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Accel’s Fred Destin On Why Startups Fail And Founders Get Fired
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Harry Stebbings
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Earlier in the week I caught up with , General Partner at Accel in London and one of the most prominent figures in the U.K. technology scene. In what turned out to be a pretty candid interview, we discussed a range of topics including the main reasons startups fail and founders get fired; how Fred analyzes the VC/Founder relationship (with what he calls ‘founder intimacy’); his experience as a board member and investor at rocketship, Deliveroo, and why most VCs are assholes. Destin also talked about his early days working at Atlas Venture in Boston, compared the US and European venture scenes, and discussed why he believes all business plans are poetry with the business model working well prior to investment being crucial.
Photo credit:
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GrabTaxi Rebrands To Grab, Launches Cashless Payments And Corporate Service
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Jon Russell
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GrabTaxi, the Uber rival in Southeast Asia and , will be now be known as “Grab” after the company announced a rebranding today alongside a few new services. The company said its new name reflects the fact that it no longer only offers licensed taxi rides, the service that it started out working with. And that’s indeed true. Over the past year or two, it has expanded its offerings to include private cars (GrabCar), motorbike taxis (GrabBike), delivery (GrabExpress) and — — carpooling with GrabHitch. In addition, the company was still known as MyTeksi in Malaysia, where it originated, so that confusion will be removed, too. “We’ve grown over the years — and we’re now much more than a taxi app. This new brand is an important evolution that represents our goal to outserve our customers. We are not only providing passengers with a transport service, we are saving them time and ensuring they have a safe ride,” Anthony Tan, Group CEO and Co-Founder of Grab, said in a statement. According to its latest numbers, Grab — which is valued at over $1 billion based on past funding rounds — has over 200,000 drivers on its platform with more than 11 million app downloads to date across it six markets in Southeast Asia. Beyond the new name — which, to be honest, I’m not a big fan of since “grab” is a fairly arbitrary term that’s ripe for humor — the company also officially announced , which had been in beta, and its cashless payment service, . Cashless payments will initially be supported in Singapore, with Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia added in February and Thailand and Vietnam “in the first half of 2016”. Finally, the service itself has been tweaked with Grab telling us that it now includes an auto-retry feature for when a booking isn’t made immediately, better driver tracking, and ‘flash’ — a service that automatically scans all rides types in the area to faster find “the best vehicle for users” in their locality. Earlier this month, aimed at supplementing its team in Southeast Asia with talent from the U.S.
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Samsung Issues Fourth-Quarter Results, Expects Earnings To Slow This Year
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Catherine Shu
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warned investors today in its fourth-quarter earnings report that its next two quarters will be weakened by economic issues and a softer IT market. The Galaxy smartphone maker said it expects profits to remain flat during the first six months of 2016, but hopes for a recovery in the second half of the year. “Expecting challenges in 2016 to maintain earnings due to a difficult business environment and slowing IT demand, the company will strive to improve performance in the second half, by capitalizing on strong seasonal demand for set business products and enhancing the product mix in components business,” Samsung said in a statement. Macroeconomic woes include volatile currency exchanges rates, which also (though the iPhone maker did much better than Samsung, pulling a record high profit). Samsung said that the strength of the Korean won compared to other major currencies had helped its third-quarter earnings, but changed to a negative impact of about 400 billion won (about $331 million) in the fourth quarter. Earnings for the period from October to December were in-line with the guidance Samsung . Operating profit was 6.1 trillion won ($5.05 billion), a 15 percent year-over-year increase, while revenue rose a slight 1.1 percent year-over-year to 53.3 trillion won. Samsung’s full-year operating profit for 2015 was 26.4 trillion won, compared to 25 trillion won in 2014. As in previous quarters, sales of Samsung mobile phones were pressured by increasing competition from other Android smartphone makers who are targeting the same growth markets, including China and India. The company’s mobile division made profit of 2.23 trillion won, a 7.3 percent decline from the previous quarter. As usual, its semiconductor business outperformed other units with an operating profit of 2.8 trillion, compared to 2.7 trillion a year ago, but the company still expects slower demand in the first quarter because of seasonal issues and a weaker IT market.
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Venmo Opens Its Payment Service To Third-Party Apps
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Jon Russell
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Venmo, the peer-to-peer payment service operated by PayPal, has now become a payment platform after it up to third-party apps and services. The feature is as simple as it sounds. Venmo users can pay inside other apps using the service, much like they might shop and pay using a PayPal button on a website. The functionality is starting out slowly though. It will initially roll out to a handful of iOS users and is limited to working with ticket ordering platform Gametime and food delivery service Munchery, but Venmo hopes to add new users, partners and features soon. The feature represents the first major attempt to monetize Venmo, which came into eBay’s business via i of Braintree, which owns Venmo, back in 2013. Quartz, which before Venmo announced it, said that it is planned that the Venmo feature will be rolled out to PayPal’s existing base of merchants, which — if true — would supercharge its reach and potentially turn it into a mobile-era PayPal. There’s plenty of competition of course. PayPal itself has mobile-centered products — like — while and are among a bevy of messaging apps used by similarly young demographics to Venmo which also offer a payment solution. Then there’s Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay, too. Venmo and Braintree are two services that have helped PayPal, a true disruptor when it burst on the scene, keep up with the pace of change as mobile becomes the primary Internet access channel for hundreds of millions on the planet. Indeed, in after-hours trading on Wednesday on the news that the firm’s revenue grew 17 percent year-on-year in Q4 2015. Braintree (and Venmo) are important branches of its business and, with the to its board this month, the payments giant is certainly keeping an eye on the future of money.
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What Are My Patents Worth?
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Neel Chatterjee
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We’ve witnessed significant upheavals in the patent system in the last few years, ranging from a in litigation (particularly ) and at patent reform. As a result, there is a sentiment amongst some lawyers that patent protection is the weakest it has been in a long time. Yet, patent litigation filings nearly hit an . We enter 2016 with some mixed signals regarding the value of patents for technology companies. Many are preaching a death of patent rights and are questioning whether to invest in patents. Will patents continue to be a worthwhile corporate investment? Is the recent trend a bubble of devaluation that will pop? We’ve identified some IP (intellectual property) trends that are important for companies planning their IP investments for 2016 and beyond. There have been two significant trends that have led to the invalidation of many patents over the last several years, and it will be interesting to see if these trends start to reverse themselves in 2016. The first trend is the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA). The AIA made a number of changes to the patent system, including the creation of “ (IPR),” “ ” and “ (CBM)” proceedings. These proceedings permit a party to request the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to review the validity of issued patents. IPR and CBM proceedings in particular became highly favored patent litigation defense strategies because they had a high “kill rate” for patent claims, were cheaper than a lawsuit and could be used to “stay” a pending patent lawsuit, reducing attorney fees. At one point, a former Federal Circuit (the appellate court for patent cases) judge deemed IPRs and CBMs “ . Accordingly, IPR and CBMs are widely viewed to have shifted the pendulum in favor of patent defendants, driving lower-value patent settlements and generally reducing the offensive value of patents. The second trend has been the fallout following the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in , which caused reverberations throughout the patent landscape by leading to the invalidation of many software patents. The decision makes clear that patents cannot claim abstract concepts without adding anything inventive. The decision has since been applied to invalidate many other software patents, ranging from patents covering financial techniques implemented using the Internet, ad-supported Internet content and many other computer-implemented concepts. These validity challenges are currently winning way more often than losing. ’s broad impact has left software companies scratching their heads about how much to invest in software patenting, with at least some startups questioning whether to build a software patent portfolio at all. The IPR and CBM patent kill rates have only underscored these concerns. However, we believe that a course correction may be on the horizon for 2016. Over the last few months, it appears that patent plaintiffs have been surviving motions — perhaps because there is now for plaintiffs to consider before filing suit more developed case law that explains how applies to patents. A suggests that the Court feels the pendulum has swung too far. In particular, the judges’ questioning in focused on whether the district court had overreached in finding that the patent claims (which related to synching lip movements of an animated character) were “abstract” and lacked inventive technical features. Recent data suggest that things are already starting to change. Specifically, the percentage of IPR/CBM challenges the USPTO accepts although, when the USPTO decides to review a patent, it is more likely to invalidate the patent. This means, roughly speaking, that the USPTO is refusing to review validity challenges with increasing frequency. In addition, it is likely that many patent litigations that were stayed pending IPR and CBM proceedings in the 2012/2013 timeframe will become “un-stayed” and resume to trial in district court in 2016 and 2017 as IPRs/CBMs conclude. A few big patent jury verdicts could quickly change the perception on whether patents are valuable offensive tools. Finally, the USPTO appears to be more willing to allow the issuance of new software patents based on that provides a number of examples of valid patents under the decision. If more software patents are allowed, and survive litigation and IPR/CBM proceedings and result in large trial verdicts, we could see a renewed interest in patent portfolio building by high-tech and software companies. One of the goals of patenting is to create a “currency” for innovations, permitting inventors and companies to sell their innovation to companies interested in developing that innovation. One of the challenges in implementing this goal is the fact that parties routinely disagree about how much a patent is worth, given the lack of market comparables for patents. Some companies have tried to set up secondary markets for patent transactions that, thus far, have not attracted market-wide acceptance. Similarly, while non-practicing entities and operating companies have purchased patent portfolios for offensive and defensive purposes, these transactions tend to be one-off purchases that don’t provide that much meaningful data. Thus, patents remain relatively illiquid assets. That may change with the renewed focus by financial entities in IP as an asset class. For example, Fortress Investment Group, a leading investment management firm that manages traditional funds for “alternative assets,” Another financing firm, Gerchen Keller, has announced expanded investment, with which to expand its portfolio of litigation (including patent litigation) financing services. One can reasonably expect that these funds will be aggressive in searching for opportunities to identify patents for assertion and work out financing deals based on the expected value of those patents. If these entities are successful and profitable, they may start a wave of financing activity in the patent sector that could make it easier for companies to value, sell or assert their patents. 2016 will be a year of experimentation. The lessons learned are still a few years away. Patent reform had a groundswell of support, only to be blocked over the summer by a bipartisan group and lobbying by the pharma/biotech industry. At one point, , with bipartisan proposals requiring a greater upfront investigation by a plaintiff before bringing a lawsuit (a reaction to “patent trolling” tactics involving hastily prepared complaints filed for the purpose of nuisance value settlements), as well as some changes to make patent litigation less expensive amongst other more technical changes. Most controversially amongst these measures were provisions that would make it easier for a defendant to recover its attorney’s fees after winning a patent litigation. Following extensive lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and venture capital industry, however, patent reform stalled out. While the odds of a potentially controversial patent reform bill being passed in the run up to a presidential election seem slim, there still remains amongst many members in the high-tech industry for further patent reform. Thus, patent reform may still be on the radar in Congress in the coming year.
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SpaceX Tests Parachutes That Will Bring Astronauts Back To Earth
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Emily Calandrelli
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Today, NASA released footage from one of SpaceX’s final certification tests required under the Commercial Crew Program. The drop test, performed in Coolidge, Arizona, involved the four large parachutes that are part of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon landing system. For the drop test, the parachute assembly was carried thousands of feet above the ground on board a C-130 cargo aircraft. A weight was used in place of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, and the parachutes were rigged to deploy as they would when Crew Dragon returns astronauts from the International Space Station. In the video, a NASA representative states that “tests like this allow engineers to assess the reliability of flight-like hardware.” This particular drop test did not include Crew Dragon’s drogue parachutes, which SpaceX will ultimately use in its full landing system design. Drogue chutes will be deployed before the 4 main chutes in order to slow and stabilize the capsule as it descends. An earlier parachute drop test was performed in December of 2013, before the necessary human-rated modifications were made to create Crew Dragon. In the 2013 drop test, a helicopter carried the Dragon capsule and its parachute system to an altitude of 8,000 feet above Morro Bay, California and dropped it into the Pacific Ocean. At the time, the parachute system included 2 drogue parachutes and 3 main parachutes. Over 2 years later, SpaceX has modified the original Dragon design to create the human-rated Crew Dragon version, which will use drogue parachutes and 4 main parachutes. Initially, SpaceX will use Crew Dragon and its parachute system to splash down the crew safely in the ocean, similar to the landing strategy used during the Apollo era. Eventually, however, SpaceX plans to bring astronauts back to land with a propulsive strategy. Back in November, SpaceX a hover test with Crew Dragon and its SuperDraco engines. The company has noted that a propulsive landing strategy is an important capability if you ever want to land humans on a planet without an ocean, like Mars. With Elon Musk at the SpaceX helm, a man who has his end goal is to get to Mars, this landing strategy is unsurprising. In a blog today, NASA stated that “later tests will grow progressively more realistic to simulate as much of the actual conditions and processes the system will see during an operational mission.” SpaceX and Boeing, the other Commercial Crew Program contract winner, are working to perfect their human-rated spacecraft and relieve the U.S. reliance on Russia for rides to the International Space Station. Assuming no anomalies in future tests, NASA hopes to have a reliable ride to the space station from a U.S. company by the end of 2017.
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Meet The Competitors Vying For The Crunchie For Angel Investor Of The Year
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Sarah Buhr
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We’re getting ready for the here at TechCrunch, where some of the brightest startups, companies and leaders hope to win the coveted Crunchie award in one of the 12 categories up for grabs. Among that mix are those who write the checks to get these startups off to a good beginning – angel investors. Below are the angels that have been selected as finalists for the Angel of the Year award, as well as a look back at some of the awesome investors who have been given this award in previous years. Come see which angel makes it to the top of our list this year at the 9th Annual Crunchies show, which takes place on February 8 at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. Tickets to the show, which is described as the Oscars of startups and technology, are starting at $115. Get your tickets today, because prices increase 10 percent Seed investors and are an investment power couple with money in Uber, SpaceX and many other high-profile startups. Scott sits on the boards of Postmates and PayPal and Cyan is the founder and EIC of photography social network website Zivity.com. runs a small, $4 million per deal seed fund, crowdsourced from more than 500 angel investors on AngelList. He co-founded Fastly and ran Wikia as its CEO until 2011. He was also an early employee at eBay and has been an active angel investor for the past 12 years, with investments in LinkedIn, PayPal, Couchsurfing and many others. The CEO and co-founder of AngelList also sits on the board of Uber and Twitter and has made 88 personal investments since 2007. is someone many in the tech community look to as a leader and go to for investment advice and remains an active angel investor. The was a Crunchies winner in this category in the seventh year of our awards show. This year we’ve seen him make a cameo on , investing $250,000 in Palo Alto-based Hatch Baby.
Aka , the investor and blogger has a strong past in wholesale and retail (starting out as a buyer at Macy’s department stores) and is a champion of women in tech. has made 46 investments since she started participating in angel rounds since 2010, including investments in Scoot, Le Tote and PlateJoy. We introduced the Best Angel award in the third year of our annual awards show, so starting with year three: is the founder of SV Angel and has served on several advisory boards for well-known tech companies including Twitter, Digg, Ask Jeeves, Facebook, Zappos, Trulia and StumbleUpon. His investments include Reddit, Brigade, Medium, Domo and a slew of other prominent startups in Silicon Valley. is one-half of the founding team of Y Combinator and co-manages the Mountain View, CA accelerator with his wife Jessica Livingston. He’s invested in countless successful startups through YC and has authored several books including On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). is a co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock. Prior to that, he was the executive vice president at PayPal. Hoffman is also on the board of Airbnb, Gowalla, and Swipely; an adviser to Groupon; and a director at Zynga, Mozilla Corp., Six Apart, Shopkick, and Kiva.org. He is an angel investor in several internet companies, including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart, and Zynga. co-founded an East Coast seed venture fund called Founder Collective and is a partner at . Dixon has made angel investments in more than 50 startups including Hipmunk, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Stripe, Pinterest, Dropbox, Codecademy, Stack Overflow, Bloomreach, Optimizely, Trialpay, OMGPOP, and Skype. You may know him from his recent participation on , but the early Twitter and Uber has met made several successful startup investments since jumping into venture capital after a career at Google as the search giant’s head of strategic initiatives. Last year we had a unique winner in this category – on Kickstarter. Facebook gave a healthy $2 billion to acquire the startup in 2014 and now those early supporters are to thank them for their loyalty in the early days.
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AdStage Looks Beyond Advertising
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Anthony Ha
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launched today — it’s supposed to bring more automation to AdStage advertisers, but CEO Sahil Jain said it also signals the company’s ambitions to become a broader marketing platform. As the name suggests, Automate allows advertisers to create rules that automatically adjust their ad campaigns across Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Those rules can address things like when an ad gets served, how to adapt campaign spending based on performance and when to alert the advertiser. AdStage has actually for a while now, but the company says it was completely rebuilt using the AdStage API. The goal is to launch new products and plug the API into third-party marketing tools in areas like sales and content marketing. In other words, Jain wants AdStage to become the product where you manage all your marketing, even when it has nothing to do with ads. “Our big vision isn’t just to own ad management,” Jain said. “Our vision is to own the meta platform across those four platforms … ads, content marketing, marketing automation and sales automation.” The company has also launched a “ ,” aimed at helping marketers get an up-to-date education on current tools and strategy.
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Accel Leads $10M Series A For JobToday’s Service Industry Hiring App
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Natasha Lomas
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Can a smartphone messaging app replace the age-old CV in the service industry sector? That’s the premise driving European startup , which is targeting the fast flow of service and blue collar workers with a mobile app that aims to speed up and simplify the hiring process. It’s today announcing a $10 million Series A round, led by Accel, along with participation from Felix Capital and existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners. As well as aiming to make it easier for small business owners to find candidates for jobs, the app aims to simplify the search and application process for service industry and blue collar workers, via a low friction, location-based mobile interface. It pledges candidates will receive a response to a job application made via its platform within 24 hours. Here’s how it works: employers and workers create a basic profile on the app, listing a few key details — such as language skills/requirements, availability/start date and last previous work experience. Everything else is done via a mobile messaging interface, so job candidates and employers who like what they see from the core profiles/job ads can connect via chat to resolve any specific questions prior to a possible interview. “From my experience in retail and what we have seen talking to other business owners, a regular business owner in retail industry, we don’t really need a full CV,” says Polina Montano, co-founder and COO, who prior to starting JobToday a year ago was managing a chain of petrol stations and dealing with what she describes as “the pain of hiring in the service area” on a day to day basis. “You need a few key elements which are relevant to certain positions — like you would like to know the last work experience, you would like to know if this person is available. These are the key elements for them.” “If you want to post a job, it’s as simple as typing a WhatsApp message,” she adds. “The world is moving towards mobile interface.” Montano argues the big, desktop web-era recruitment giants and job boards are ill-suited to the segment it is targeting — not least because a majority of hiring by small businesses still takes place offline, with paper CVs — hence her ambition of building “the LinkedIn for blue collar jobs”. “As a SME you are constantly faced with the challenge of hiring people in short term,” says Montano, arguing that the convenience and speed of a mobile app and mobile messaging is a perfect fit for the time-strapped small business owners her startup is targeting. “A lot of pre-screening before the interviews happens via chat. So let’s say if an employer gets an application he would normally come back to the job seeker asking him relevant questions about the position.” Employers shortlist potential candidates within the app, with those not being shortlisted at least being notified that their application did not succeed within a day — a step up on waiting but never hearing back after handing in a paper CV. “For people who work in service industry having a job is not a luxury. It’s a must have… These people can’t wait. They need to hear today.” “We are connecting people instantly via chat on our platform,” she adds. “People connect, ask questions, people are connecting to jobs ultimately. This is what we are here for. We created this company to help people at the moment they are challenged and lost in the current job market. It’s not so easy today to look for a job… It’s a daunting task, especially let’s say for the lower skilled segment of the population. We just felt that these people need a helping hand to help them find their very best employment. Key industry sectors it’s targeting include retail, hospitality, delivery drivers/logistics, and the beauty industry, says Montano. The app launched in Spain back in April last year and is now nationwide in every “big city” in the country, as well as now also just launched in London and Paris. Some of the new funding will go towards working on understanding and serving the specific market needs of the new cities. “What we need to do is we need to strengthen our positions in existing markets and certainly look for new markets and new opportunities within 2016,” she notes. At this point JobToday has some 20,000 employers signed up — including the likes of Ann Summers, Deliveroo, Reiss and YouMeSushi — and estimates it’s managed to fill 10,000 jobs since launch eight months ago. (Although it is not explicitly tracking when a person has been hired via its platform so this is based on analyzing user behavior within the app, says Montano). It’s not breaking out user numbers at this point — but will say it has processed two million job applications since launch. Business model wise, it’s not currently charging employers to list jobs on the platform. The focus is on scaling its jobs marketplace and attracting candidates, as you’d expect. But Montano argues the SME segment it targets is used to paying for job-board style services so in the future sees a “straightforward” route to monetization (assuming it can get the scale). She also asserts there are no direct rivals to JobToday — claiming it’s the first mobile recruitment platform targeting the service industry. “It’s a mass market and so far it doesn’t have an adequate mobile hiring solution for the sector,” she argues. That said, there is already one rather similar looking app, , out in the wild — albeit currently focused on the Italian market. So JobToday is likely going to need to scale fast to outrun a little copy-paste competition. And — rather more pressingly — what’s to stop an existing mobile messaging platform like WhatsApp becoming the de facto conduit for blue collar businesses and job candidates to connect? Not a whole lot it would seem. Earlier this month the messaging giant, which is fast , revealed it is dropping its annual $1 subscription fee and testing more commercial services — including a B2C business for companies to communicate with their customers… So what is to stop WhatsApp eating JobToday’s lunch down the line? “Just the convenience and the ease of working with resumes which are coming in. We really thought it through,” says Montano. “I was working in this industry for many, many years and I experienced this pain of hiring workers first hand for my own businesses. And I know what a small business owner is looking for. We understand the value, we understand what exact pain-points mobile interface replaces. And really optimize our interface for the comfort and ease of use.”
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A Long Game
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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the Gold Rush, California has blossomed with new money — first in gold, then in land, cattle, railroads, agriculture, film images, shipbuilding, aerospace, electronics, television and commercial religions. The ease with which the happy few become suddenly rich lends credence to the belief in magical transformation.” — Lewis Lapham, 1979, “Lost Horizon” “When do you think people in the Bay Area started to realize that you could make more money from tech than from real estate?” Jed Kolko asked me. We were sitting at , a coffee shop frequented by San Francisco’s political movers two blocks from City Hall and kitty corner from Twitter’s headquarters in the Shorenstein-owned former San Francisco Furniture Mart. Just outside the window was Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare. into a teeming boomtown, a 30-year-old Irish immigrant named Jasper O’Farrell presciently surveyed the street to be 120 feet wide — which is broader than the Philadelphia main street it was named after — even though the city was only 500 residents strong at the time. “1980s,” I said in response to his question. Seemed obvious. The PC revolution. Steve Jobs and Apple. And a decade after the Peninsula was christened “Silicon Valley” by an electronics trade newsletter and the “Fairchildren,” or alumni of Fairchild Semiconductor, went on to found Intel, National Semiconductor and AMD. 2005 was his guess. The year after Google IPO-ed, and when escalating home prices made real estate an ever-riskier bet. That was the year that he felt that more people started coming to San Francisco for professional ambition rather than lifestyle reasons such as being openly gay or for pursuing callings that didn’t need to be so well-compensated. Like a handful of other people at the intersection of real estate and technology, Kolko would be in a position to make an educated stab. He led some research at the well-regarded nonprofit, non-partisan think tank for five years, and then was the head economist at real estate startup . It was a provocative rhetorical question. Land, labor, capital. Technological change. How do they intersect? In some ways, we’re lucky that the first two decades involving the advent of the commercial Internet were largely a positive-sum game. The creation of digital space for self-expression, at near-zero cost, does not necessarily challenge or erode someone else’s right to space or resources. That makes it easy to forget that California is a state built throughout generations of conflict over land and its inherent constraints. It is this oldest of resources — not capital or human talent or ingenuity — that most constrains the region’s potential for workers at all income levels. Cities, or physical communities, are one of the hardest kinds of scaling problems that exist. The infrastructure needed to sustain bigger networks, such as schools, sewers and mass transit, gets harder — not easier — to develop, finance and maintain the larger your population becomes. There are countless constituencies of different incomes, racial groups, interests and professions that are all vying with each other for limited space. Although it’s possible to build up, urban development is much more of a zero-sum game. With every major economic shift , from an agrarian to an industrial economy, and then an industrial to a knowledge-and-services economy , California and the United States have faced distinctive junctures in their approach to land-use and housing. I believe we’re hitting another major juncture, although I don’t know when it will deteriorate to the point that it forces real reform. California’s fragmented, post-war suburban model, which was created for a more even wage distribution in a mass industrial economy, is clearly becoming more dysfunctional by the year for a knowledge-and-services economy with a wider level of income stratification. Not only are we not building enough housing overall, we have scarce sources of funding for supporting those on the lower-earning ends of a rapidly widening income spectrum. So we end up politicizing and extracting funds out of new construction even though we are 40 years deep into a largely self-imposed housing shortage. There are a couple of disturbing trends showing up in the data. If you look across the state’s workforce, Californians born in 1990 are . That’s way above the 30-percent-of-income level that is generally considered to be the threshold of whether housing is affordable or not in public policy conversations. Then, if you look at working-class segments, : This is troubling because in determining a child’s chances of climbing from the lowest income quintile to the highest-earning one. That morning and evening time between parents and children that is taken up by commuting is invaluable for bonding and child development. Cities around the Bay Area are starting to contort themselves into stranger and stranger positions just to support basic public services. Suburbs like Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered, are now having to build because the cost of living is too high for an entry-level teacher making $55,000 a year. Meanwhile, the city has approved another Apple campus that will , while only committing to building 1,400 housing units over the next seven years. I’m not sure when a breaking point happens, but I want to offer some essays and short pieces over the next few days to give you a couple of takeaways. The TL;DR is that I’m going to start working on new projects soon, but I want to leave a map behind of what I think has to be done long-term in Northern California. Here are the additional pieces (and I’ll be posting more in the days to come): California has faced housing and land shortages multiple times and has changed its regulatory regimes in response. I’m going to start with two histories from the state’s first Gilded Age and post-war era. In the first Gilded Age, the concern was over land monopolization by a handful of large-scale owners and how that crowded out and impoverished labor. In the postwar period, California leveraged the automobile and federal subsidies to unlock previously inaccessible land and create a golden age of cheap housing and suburbanization. This boom period ended in the 1970s as the state’s flat, developable coastal lands were built out and the oil crisis made sprawl more expensive. That’s when housing shifted from being perceived as a consumable good to an investable asset. Since then, with Californian Baby Boomers protecting entitlements and higher property values for themselves in the form of land-use restrictions and . Global capital has been subverting and taking advantage of these favorable legal and taxation protections on real estate in a extremely low interest-rate world. All of this has come at the cost of the state’s working and middle class and its future workforce. It faces major cities in all economies that chose a housing-as-an-investable-asset model following World War II like the U.K. and Australia. After the credit-fueled housing crises of the 2000s tested the upper bound of what the homeownership rate could be, many countries are grappling with lower homeownership rates for the foreseeable future. This raises questions about what the future balance of tenant and homeowner rights and subsidies should look like. There are alternate approaches in industrialized countries like Germany and Japan that make housing more of a consumable good rather than an appreciable asset, but it’s hard to see how we could ever shift toward those models since there is so much national wealth tied up in housing. There is no “magical transformation” here (unless VR and telepresence renders location obsolete, which the Internet certainly didn’t do). Technology companies and political leaders completely underestimate the depth of reform that’s needed to actually solve housing affordability. Right now, San Francisco and New York City are reliant on inclusionary zoning, which effectively taxes the production of new housing in order to finance subsidized, affordable housing. It’s a Band-Aid solution that lets everyone stay in a system structured to keep property values higher (e.g. making housing less affordable) while providing a teeny-tiny, token amount of low-income housing. For example, inclusionary housing has produced and . Meanwhile, the value of the city’s assessed property . We need to capture more of the land value increases that property owners are accruing through no particular special effort of their own, . Unfortunately, most jurisdictions in the state are designed to be majority homeowner, and the state’s Third Rail, Proposition 13, hasn’t been touched since the late 1970s. It’s hard to see a political constituency that could change this unless it gets really bad. That said, California’s homeownership rate is the lowest it’s been since 1991 and . Maybe we just have to wait another 10 to 15 years until the composition of the electorate changes enough for reform. While the technology industry and its compensation practices have increased the region’s income inequality over the last generation, taxing businesses, wealth or investments alone for affordable housing funds won’t solve the housing issue. Dumping hundreds of millions of dollars of public or philanthropic capital down a badly designed property system will not get you very far because it will drive land values even higher, producing an unearned windfall for property owners. For San Francisco to build affordable housing in the Mission District today, private land owners in just land costs from the San Francisco city government . The Latino community fought and used the threat of a moratorium on new housing construction to wrestle $50 million out of . It was the first affordable housing bond the city had passed in almost 20 years. But then the Mission community Keep in mind that California also already has the most it , especially on properties worth more than $1 million. The downside of being extremely reliant on income and capital gains taxes and having low property taxes is that the and . So while you could go down this route — and there are interesting conversations about , and — you’d have to do it land-use and property taxation reform to have any real impact on housing affordability. An economic downturn may soften pressure on local housing markets, but it will not fix this problem. The Bay Area’s housing market tends to rise and then plateau; this is a function of how local land markets work. Even though developers tend to get pilloried in the public process, it is the land owners that get egged on by local brokers to sell at the absolute highest price. Because there is no structural disincentive to sitting on underutilized land because of property tax caps, land owners can just sit a weak cycle out, withhold their land from the market and wait for the next upswing. While there are quasi-public institutions that sustain mortgage and home-buying demand through weak parts of the economic cycle, . When markets turned in 2008, project financing evaporated, which left the city without a decent construction pipeline until it was too late in the up-cycle. The same thing may happen in the next downturn. If the tech industry wants a faster solution than waiting for several decades of reform, it could decentralize and encourage more viable tech hubs elsewhere. When Detroit’s automobile industry was around the same age that Silicon Valley is today, it began , decades before the and competition from Asian automakers. However, even if tech decentralizes a little bit, the state’s working- and middle-class are still screwed because these are issues that are deeply rooted in California’s approach to land-use and property taxation that stretch back decades. They’re well outside of Silicon Valley.
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Fitz Tepper
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Facebook Spikes 12% After Smashing Q4 Earnings
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Matthew Lynley
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Facebook shares are spiking today, and were up as much as 13 percent after the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings. The culprit? Once again, the company completely crushed expectations for its operating quarter. Facebook brought in $5.841 billion in revenue and earnings of 79 cents per share, compared to earnings of 68 cents per share and $5.37 billion in revenue. Facebook also revealed a slew of new strong stats, and said that users are watching 100 million hours of video every single day. Eighty percent of the company’s advertising business now comes from mobile devices. Part of the reason for the quarter’s success was that the company did a much better job of monetizing its international markets, which it’s somewhat struggled with historically. A good stock price does a number of things for a company, but one key element is keeping morale high and helping Facebook attract new talent. Facebook is competing with the largest technology companies in the world, holding itself at a more than $200 billion market cap. A good stock price at least helps keep that new talent flowing in as Facebook looks to continue iterating its products and bring the rest of the world online. Like Apple, Facebook’s CFO mentioned that there was some impact from foreign exchange rates — an issue companies are seeing broadly these days — but it seems that Facebook was at least partially immune to broad-based macroeconomic weakness. So all this is pretty good news for Facebook. While many other technology companies like Square, Twitter and even Apple are falling, Facebook came out the gate swinging and was promptly rewarded by investors, who are increasingly looking for monetary progress instead of simple growth. [graphiq id=”7LTYByAkBsF” title=”Facebook Inc. (FB) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/7LTYByAkBsF” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/14143267/Facebook-Inc-in-Menlo-Park-CA” link_text=”Facebook Inc. (FB) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”] In fact, Facebook’s user base didn’t actually grow that much, but its monetization engine continues to improve, and it has started multiple efforts to get the rest of the world online to greater expand the base of users it can inevitably monetize. While other companies are trying to focus on growth and figure out the monetization engine later, Facebook’s focus has to be improving its advertising products — which it appears to be succeeding in thus far.
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Health Agency Says Theranos Lab Practices Pose “Immediate Jeopardy” To Patient Safety
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Anthony Ha
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More bad news for : A federal health agency has declared that the blood test company’s “deficient practices … pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” In on January 25, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it identified deficiencies related to hematology and analytic systems, and with the lab’s laboratory director, technical supervisor and testing personnel. (The deficiencies causing “immediate jeopardy” were in the area of hematology.) The letter states that Theranos has 10 days to provide “acceptable evidence of correction” or face penalties. In response, Theranos sent out this statement: This survey of our Newark, CA lab began months ago [the CMS says the “onsite survey” was completed on November 20] and does not reflect the current state of the lab. As the survey took place we were simultaneously conducting a comprehensive review of our laboratory’s systems, processes and procedures to ensure that we have best-in-class quality systems. We value engagement with our regulators, and are committed to ensuring that all our labs operate at the highest standards. We are still reviewing the report, but we addressed many of the observations during the survey and are actively continuing to take corrective action. A full plan of correction will be submitted to CMS within days. More specifically, Theranos said that the findings were not related to the company’s Arizona lab “where we currently process over 90 percent of our tests” and that the Newark lab has a new director and clinical consultant. Theranos also said the CMS did not issue findings about many of the allegations (like whether Theranos was “cheating” the proficiency tests that are necessary to certify its instruments’ accuracy) that last fall.
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Let’s Meet In Pittsburgh Tomorrow
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John Biggs
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I will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow for , pitch-off in the heart of Iron City. I’d like to see yuns there. As a CMU grad Pittsburgh is near and dear to my heart. From the O to the Beehive (RIP) some of my formative years were spent in a stupor of coffee and fat. I want to see what you guys are up to in PGH and want to eat some Primanti Brothers, in that order. You can get .
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500 Startups Announces Batch 16, Focused On Health Tech, FinTech, Vices And Recruiting
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Lucas Matney
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Just as investors and journalists get ready to check out what’s new over at 500 Startups at its Batch 15 Demo Day, their team has announced a new batch of founders and startups aimed at changing their industries/solving problems all while making a buck or two. 500 Startups has been aiming to produce a more diverse class of companies that isn’t just solving Silicon Valley’s problems. Over the past few months, the accelerator has continued launching funds in , , and others joining their expanding host of initiatives abroad. In this batch specifically, about a third of the founders are international and 27% are from outside of Silicon Valley. Batch 16 has a little bit of everything from craft beer delivery service to artificially intelligent teaching assistants. Scour through the list below to see all 52 of the new companies joining the 500 Startups team. You can also see for some of our Batch 14 favorites from 500’s Demo-Ween showcase this past October. Like what you see or think you have a cool idea yourself? 500 Startups has opened up applications for Batch 17, which you can apply to right .
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Facebook Hits 100M Hours Of Video Watched A Day, 1B Users On Groups, 80M On Fb Lite
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Josh Constine
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Everything at Facebook seems to be growing, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s call comments. Facebook now sees 100 million hours of daily video watch time. There are 1 billion monthly users now users on Groups, up from 925 million at the close of Q3. 80 million people use Facebook’s stripped down app Facebook Lite for the developing world’s slow connections, up from 50 million at the end of Q3. 500 million users are on Events, up from 450 million in July, and they created 123 million events in 2015. Facebook has 2.5 million advertisers and 50 million small businesses on Pages up from 45 million last quarter. Users are leaving billions of comments on these pages, which bodes well for Facebook’s plan to make Messenger the new way people communicate and complain to businesses. It’s becoming a serious competitor to YouTube for video viewing, it’s building ways to attract users in the developing world, it’s giving every more ways to share than just the News Feed, it’s solidifying itself as the way to invite people to birthday parties and big ticketed events, and businesses are using it to host communication with customers. Each of these comes with monetization opportunities. There’s lucrative video ads, low-bandwidth slideshow ads for slow connections, commerce ads targeted to people who use groups to buy and sell, Event ads for promoters trying to sell tickets, and ads that encourage users to reach out to businesses over Messenger. More and more, it seems like Facebook’s ascent before the shift to mobile has enabled a unique opportunity to be much more than a social network. On phones, concise experiences like Snapchat and Instagram rule. But Facebook instituted itself when people were still open to single sites with lots of features. Groups, Events, Pages and more have blossomed over the last half decade into critical utilities when they might not have fit if Facebook had to start on mobile. And while there are plenty of competitors vying for people’s time on mobile, they’re typically only nipping at Facebook’s ankles. With the failure of Google+, there is no other service poised to challenge Facebook as a core provider and platform for identity. With so many every day needs and outside apps dependent on Facebook, it doesn’t look like its growth will slow down any time soon.
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Social Investing Startup SprinkleBit Raises $10M
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that helps you invest with guidance from friends and experts, has raised $10 million in new funding from GTC. It’s to tap into the wisdom of the crowd to do better on the stock market, but SprinkleBit offers a unique tool called , or VPI — each stock gets scored based on whether the community thinks its price will increase, and each user gets scored based on how accurately they predict future prices. (The VPI is actually based on CEO Alexander Wallin’s .) While the VPI is maybe the most interesting thing about SprinkleBit’s approach, the startup’s built a full social platform, where users can trade risk-free with SprinkleBucks and follow other users’ trades. Then, if they feel like putting actual money on the line, they can switch to SprinkleBit’s brokerage mode and buy and sell stocks for real. (Wallin said that with the combination of social investing and real trading, his team had to do a lot of work to make sure SprinkleBit is compliant with regulations.) There’s also an educational component — the company offers a set of online investing tutorials called SprinkleBit University. You can use SprinkleBit’s social side for free, but it charges an $8 commission on trades. You can also pay $9.95 a month for SprinkleBit Premium, which cuts the commission to $5 and includes additional data and tools. The service was first launched in 2012 and currently has about 10,000 users. Wallin said the company is only getting ready to do a serious marketing push now, because it’s finally ready to “start on-boarding the masses.” As for how might affect usage, he said, “I think it’s a good time, because when the market is going well, it’s all about greed, and any platform will make money … Now, when you have to actually know which stocks are going to go up, you need a tool [like this].” SprinkleBit has raised a total of $13.5 million. It’s also in the process of relocating its headquarters from San Diego to New York City.
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Shelf Helps You Find The Best Products People Actually Use
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Sarah Perez
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A newly launched startup called wants to make it easier for people to discover great products, without having to first read through tons of online research or consumer reviews. Instead, the company has built a social platform that lets users automatically keep track of their own inventory of purchases, and selectively share this information with friends. The idea is to bring word-of-mouth recommendations to the web, so you can find out what items the people you trust already own and use. And later, when you’re ready to unload your own items to make room for new ones, Shelf helps automate the selling process, too. Though Shelf appears to consumers as a simple website for cataloging, sharing, and selling things, the technology behind the site has actually been in development for a couple of years. The San Francisco-based startup was founded by (CEO) and (CTO), who worked together for some eight years prior including at (which spun out of .) Third co-founder Adriana Diakite (software engineer) has a background which includes Amazon A9, Palantir, Pivotal Labs, and Google. Originally, Esho tells us, the team was working on a platform focused on helping consumers sell items they already own. But in the process of testing this idea with friends and early adopters, something unexpected happened. “We started discovering all these products that we hadn’t heard about, and they spawned conversations,” explains Esho. “We were inspired by all these new things we were buying and learning about through our friends, that we wouldn’t have uncovered otherwise. We realized that the grand vision with Shelf is that it could be the smart center for your things,” he says. At launch, the site offers three main features: the ability to browse and discover products, the ability to optionally track your own items, and the ability to sell those items when the time comes. What makes Shelf different from the “rate anything” that in years past is that the site focuses on pointing you to your friends’ authenticated purchases. In order to catalog your inventory, you can either authorize Shelf to scan your email for receipts or you can download a file of your purchases from Amazon, then upload it to the site. (There’s also a way to manually add items, though the team believes that will not be the main way people use the service.) At launch, Shelf supports receipts from over 50 online stores, including Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Target, Zappos, and all the other top retailers, ranging from big box stores like Office Depot to department stores like Macy’s, and from clothing shops like J. Crew to e-commerce outfits like Wayfair. Your online inventory is private by default, so you can choose what’s shared. You can also organize the items you share into specific “shelves,” so they’re easier to sort through by friends. [gallery ids="1269063,1269062,1269061,1269060,1269059"] The site uses a following model, so you can be more selective about who you choose to friend, and whose recommendations you trust. And when you find a product a friend owns, you can comment directly on the item’s page to begin a conversation. Where Shelf is more practical – or rather, where it will be in the future – is on the selling side. Today, the site uses the data collected automatically about your item like its name, date of purchase, price paid, and more, in order to pre-fill in the fields on the destination marketplace. For now, that’s limited to Amazon, but Esho says they’re adding support for Ebay and Craigslist soon. However, a bit further down the road, Shelf will make selling even more seamless by allowing you to sell without every having to leave Shelf.com itself – it will handle the listing for you. Plus, Shelf will make suggestions about item pricing, based on current market conditions, says Esho. Shelf is backed by $1.2 million in seed funding led by Google Ventures back in 2014. Additional investors and advisors include 500 Startups (Dave McClure), Auren Hoffman, Nirav Tolia, Scott Banister, Alex Schultz, Maria Thomas, Jeff Epstein, Donna Wells, Brian Roberts, Jason Putorti, Erik Moore, and others.
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eBay Crashes Nearly 10% As Revenue Remains Flat
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Matthew Lynley
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Investors clearly don’t like what they see with eBay, which reported its fourth-quarter earnings today — sending shares down around 10% in extended trading. The company said it had earnings of 50 cents per share on revenue of $2.3 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of 50 cents a share on revenue of $2.32 billion. Net revenue hardly changed from the same quarter last year, and gross merchandise volume remained basically unchanged as well. In order to continue growing its business, it needs those numbers to keep going up, and that’s something that investors are clearly paying close attention. What that could signal was a weaker holiday quarter — which is crucial for e-commerce companies — than what people were hoping. [graphiq id=”7zqtUFC6bPf” title=”Ebay Inc. (EBAY) Stock Price – 90 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/7zqtUFC6bPf” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/20452465/Ebay-Inc-in-San-Jose-CA” link_text=”Ebay Inc. (EBAY) Stock Price – 90 Days | FindTheCompany”] eBay split from PayPal last year, essentially turning it into a new company without the payments service buoying it. Since the split, the company’s shares have performed so-so. The company’s services didn’t grow, but they didn’t decline, either. There are probably a lot of additional forces at play in tech across the board, including what might be a lighter holiday season and major negative macroeconomic trends. But it still seems that what eBay is doing isn’t what investors are looking for, as the company increasingly competes with companies like Amazon. And if you’re competing with Amazon, you need the amount of things people are selling — or at least, the amount of money you’re making off your total sales — to keep going up. ( : Added some additional clarification around the performance of the stock, including a correction regarding the company’s Q2 stock drop related to the PayPal spinoff.)
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PayPal Shares Up 6% On Earnings; Revenue Rises 17%
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Katie Roof
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PayPal reported earnings after the bell Wednesday, and the stock quickly ticked up 6% in after hours trading. The payments company authorized a $2 billion stock repurchase program and reported revenue and earnings that exceeded the company’s full year guidance. PayPal’s fourth quarter adjusted revenue came in at $2.56 billion, up 17% year-over-year. Adjusted net income was $443 million or 36 cents per share, showcasing 27% growth since the same quarter last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were forecasting 35 cents per share on $2.51 billion in revenue. Spun off from eBay last July, PayPal has fallen 22% since its high last summer. PayPal is the bigger of the two companies, with a market cap of $39 billion. eBay stands at $32 billion. While some people view PayPal as the digital payments platform of yesteryear, they often don’t recognize that PayPal owns Braintree, the mobile payments system that powers scores of apps, ranging from Uber to Airbnb. In other words, every time you take an Uber, PayPal makes money! PayPal is also the owner of Venmo, a peer-to-peer mobile payments app that is very popular with Millennials. Venmo has done little to monetize, but it is Yet it is a competitive landscape for digital payments, as Apple, Square and Android continue to make strides in this space. James Cakmak, analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt, wrote in a research note on Monday that “PayPal’s competitors function on a far leaner basis and we believe the company can operate with significantly more efficiency.” On the investor relations call Wednesday, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said “payments is a hard business to crack,” adding “our biggest competition is our ability to execute against our game plan.” PayPal also , a company that specializes in overseas transfers. PayPal shares closed Wednesday at $31.59.
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Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
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Josh Constine
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By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That’s up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue growth is stunning, and it’s up 51% vs Q4 last year. Facebook’s monthly user count grew a bit slower at 2.58% quarter over quarter from extremely strong 4.02% growth. It shows Facebook is hitting saturation in some markets but still has room to grow in many developing countries. Though not as flashy as the big monthly number, daily user count is a better way to chart Facebook’s progress. Facebook’s DAU hit 1.04 billion compared to 1.01 billion in Q3, up 2.97%. Facebook’s DAU to MAU ratio, or stickyness, held firm at 65%. That means users aren’t visiting less even as the service ages. Mobile now makes up a massive 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, up from 78% in Q3. $5.63 billion of its total revenue came from advertising, overshadowing Facebook’s old payments business. Mobile-only users now number 827 million, up a swift 13.2% from 723 million last quarter. That’s a testament to Facebook growth in the developing world that largely skipped the full-sized computer age. [Update: Mark Zuckerberg also released during the Q4 Earnings call: Analysts estimated Facebook would see $5.37 billion in revenue and $0.68 EPS, meaning Facebook crushed estimates. eMarketer that will grab $9.86 billion in U.S. display ad revenue in 2016 — a 30.6% share of total U.S. display ad spending. Facebook was at $94.45 at the end of regular trading before earnings were released, and is now up 6.7% from market close to $100.71. Facebook managed to steeply grow average revenue per user 25.5% from Q3’s $2.97 to $3.73. That’s also a 28.1% increase over Q4 last year. Facebook did particularly well in increasing revenue from the developing “rest of world” region to $1.22 per user, which was up 29.8% both this quarter and compared to Q4 last year. Facebook had $692 million in capital expenditures, and $2.14 billion in free cash flow for Q4. As for the full 2015 year, Facebook reached $17.93 billion in revenue, up a remarkable 44% year-over-year, with a profit of $3.69 billion. Monetizing the developing world is a big part of it. Back in Q1 2012, Facebook was earning a measly $0.32 per user in the “rest of world” segment. It’s almost 4X that now. Despite these users being on slow connections, old smartphones or even feature phones, and not having much buying power, Facebook is convincing advertisers to pay to reach them. On the earnings call, Facebook admitted that video is propelling engagement and time spent on its properties. Facebook sees 8 billion video views a day from 500 million users, which amounts to 100 million hours of time spent watching videos per day. This all allows Facebook to slip video ads into the News Feed and its Suggested Videos reel that appears when you finish watching another. The Facebook Audience Network that uses its data to target ads in other apps hit a $1 billion revenue run rate. Facebook was expected to have strong sales of Instagram ads this quarter, which could be contributing to its revenue. Messenger’s continued dominance amongst western chat apps is also keeping users firmly inside the Facebook family of apps. Instant Articles could be helping too. They effectively bar the exits from the News Feed, ensuring users don’t bounce from the app while waiting for a news article to load in the browser. And when they’re done reading, they can just go on Facebooking and seeing ads. Looking forward, Facebook could potentially devise a new Instant Ads format that would give brands the fast-loading rich media of Instant Articles, so users aren’t discouraged from clicking.
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Can Fractional Car Ownership Work?
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Connie Loizos
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A couple of weeks ago, Ford Motor Company somewhat quietly announced that next month, it’s beginning a in Austin that will enable three to six people to lease a Ford Vehicle together. It’s not alone in thinking about fractional car ownership. Audi is similarly trying out a fractional car called Audi Unite that allows up to five people to own a car together. (It launched, and remains exclusively available, in Stockholm, Sweden.) A nascent startup in London called is also entering the business of fractional car ownership. The big question, of course, is whether the concept – which has been enormously successful when it comes to hotel time shares and private jets – can work when it comes to cars. People clearly aren’t wedded to owning vehicles as they once were, partly owing to congestion and related parking challenges, and partly owing to the rising cost of cars, particularly as they grow increasingly sophisticated. It’s no wonder that car-hailing services like Lyft and Uber — along with car-sharing services like ZipCar and Getaround — have taken off like gangbusters. Even General Motors, which estimates that there are currently six million people around the world using a shared-based model of transportation, thinks that number will grow between now and the end of the decade. In fact, that foregone conclusion explains why GM, along with Ford, Audi and BMW, have recently begun testing out their own car-sharing services. They haven’t gone terribly well to date, though. While GM’s service is , BMW’s pilot program, called DriveNow, was in its pilot city of San Francisco last November. The company cited the city’s parking policies as too big a hindrance. We haven’t heard a whole lot about Audi’s on-demand program, , either. The nine-month-old service chose San Francisco as its testbed, and it still hasn’t expanded out of the city. (For what it’s worth, Uber expanded out of San Francisco and into New York City 10 months after it launched its operations.) Given these earlier initiatives, carmakers’ newer ideas about fractional ownership make a certain kind of sense. You can imagine, for example, people who might not like the idea of all the germs that invariably come with popular car-sharing services. Buying a car with a small group can be a similarly priced but cleaner alternative. Fractional ownership also puts luxury cars within the reach of many more people. You can bet people would share Tesla Model S cars if the company came up with a fractional ownership scheme. In the meantime, two models that Orto plans to make available to up to four buyers per car are the prohibitively expensive Jaguar F-Type S and BMWi8. (Orto legally maintains possession of the cars, so its customers needn’t be bothered with the paperwork.) Carmakers have even clearer incentives to make fractional ownership work. After all, convincing people to split the cost of owning or leasing a car is less risky than relying on fickle customers to subscribe to their car-share services. Still, there are plenty of reasons why fractional car ownership could stall out before things get rolling. Most obviously, it may remain easier to simply call up a car on a smartphone than figure out how to block out time or how much each co-owner or lease signee will pay each month. If you’ve ever shared a car with someone who does not live with you, as I did in college with my sister, you can easily see how conflicts might arise. (Note: No app existed at the time to help us in our scheduling endeavors, unlike today.) Depending on who is handling the car’s maintenance, fractional car ownership can also be more costly than using on-demand services. Even automotive analysts sound uncertain about whether fractional ownership can gain anywhere near the same traction as peer-to-peer car sharing and car-hailing services. Martyn Briggs, a London-based mobility analyst at Frost & Sullivan, says he expects both “to grow for different reasons,” given that people have such varying needs. “Some people who take a trip once a month are likely to choose car-sharing, where someone who takes two or three trips a week may find fractional ownership cheaper than a car-share service,” he says. Michelle Krebs, a senior auto analyst for AutoTrader.com, thinks what works longer term will “vary widely by location. The needs of someone in London versus Austin are probably quite different, so we’re going to see a lot of variations on this theme.” Meanwhile, Max Zanan, an automotive retail expert with IDDS Group, says he’s skeptical that fractional ownership will become widely embraced. “If you’re a gazillionaire and you have multiple residences and maybe want a Ferrari in New York and an SUV at your disposal for when you’re in Colorado, that might make sense, but I’m not sure it will work for regular people like you and me. People’s schedules change too much.” Zanan says he doesn’t blame carmakers, who he thinks are “panicking in general and trying every conceivable model because they’re trying to predict the future. They fear that Google or Tesla or Uber are going to disrupt their business model otherwise.” Still, he notes, “That doesn’t necessarily mean they are making good decisions.”
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Here’s What Push Notifications Look Like When You Have 8M Followers On Instagram
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Jon Russell
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Just for fun. Imagine if you had an Instagram account with eight million followers. Imagine if you switched push notifications on for your account. Here’s what your phone would do after you posted a new photo or video. https://www.facebook.com/demydezeeuw/videos/957955867617029 Thanks to Demy De Zeeuw, who runs (the excellent) , for sharing a taste of Internet fame. 433’s photos and videos typically get 200,000-plus likes — so, Demy, go switch those push notifications off before your phone (and/or head) explodes.
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Facebook’s ‘Mentions’ App For Celebrities And Other Verified Users Comes To Android
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Jon Russell
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News just in that’s strictly for the one-percenters among us: , the service for verified users of the global social network, . The app isn’t open to all, you need that elusive blue tick of verification/fame to get it. That’s because it’s designed to give verified users a way to easily share public status updates, photos and videos with fans on the go — all without spamming their actual friends along the way. Mentions will only post publicly, to fans and followers, but — crucially — it is also . (Live broadcasting was initially just for famous people, but to all users last month.) way back in July 2014 so it’s certainly taken the app, which is marketed at “actors, athletes, musicians and other influencers,” some time to make its way to the Android side of mobile. So, in summary, if you’re an ambitious young TechCrunch reader, you won’t need to dump your or when you make it big as a celeb, famous tech founder or sports player. That’s one less weight off your mind, no doubt.
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Chinese Gaming Firm Buys 60% Of Gay Dating App Grindr For $93M
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Jon Russell
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Grindr, the social network for gay men, has to Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech for $93 million. The deal, which values six-year-old Grindr at $155 million, is the first time that the U.S. company has taken outside investment. that Grindr has two million daily users, who spend an average of 54 minutes inside the app. Those are impressive engagement rates, and the company is reported to have generated $32 million in revenue in 2014, up from $25 million one year previous. Grindr founder and CEO Joel Simkhai described the investment as “a huge vote of confidence in our vision to connect gay men to even more of the world around them,” but stressed that it would be “business as usual” despite the influx of capital. Simkhai and Grindr’s employees retain the remaining shares in the company, and expect that the alliance will allow the service — which has become the de facto hook-up app for gay men — to expand into new areas. “We have taken this investment in our company to accelerate our growth, to allow us to expand our services for you, and to continue to ensure that we make Grindr the number one app and brand for our millions of users,” Simkhai wrote in . “We have users in every country in the world, but in order to get to the next phase of our business and grow faster, we needed a partner,” Carter McJunkin, Grindr’s COO, added via an interview with the New York Times. The deal will also allow Beijing Kunlun Tech to expand its own reach outside of China. The company, which is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange in China, has been busy diversifying and expanding its business. It in micro-loan company Qufenqi, and . It’s unclear whether this latest investment will see Beijing Kunlun tech will bring Grindr to China, where is the top dating service for gay men with a reported two million members.
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Jason-3, Sea Level, And Why It All Matters
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Emily Calandrelli
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SpaceX is scheduled to the Jason-3 satellite on Sunday, January 17 at 1:42 PM EST from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Jason-3, a mission from NOAA and NASA, will measure sea level heights around the world. It’s equipped with a radar altimeter which can track sea surface heights by pulsing microwaves down at the surface of the ocean and measuring the time it takes for that pulse to return to the spacecraft. Using that time, it can calculate the distance between the sea and the spacecraft. Because the scientists know exactly where the spacecraft is relative to the Earth’s core, it can calculate the distance from the Earth’s core to the height of the sea. This is just one important input, however, that’s required to get global sea level. As it turns out, global sea level is not, in fact, the level of the sea. Or at least, not for most people. We use “sea level” as a standard reference point for things like aviation, marine navigation, and even determining the height of mountains. For example, the tallest mountain in world, above sea level, is Mount Everest. But the tallest mountain from base to summit is actually the Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Kea, which is partly underwater. And to make matters more interesting, the tallest point on Earth (measured from the center of the planet) is Mount Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador. Defining sea level makes it possible for us to measure the height of everything on land which is important for global maps and those who use them. Measuring sea level over time is important for our understanding of global warming, sea level rise, and how it’s going to affect coastal cities around the world. So how is this important reference point “sea level” calculated? [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q65O3qA0-n4] Global sea level is the average height from all of the Earth’s oceans from the sea floor. But calculating the average is not as simple as you may think. In order to determine the height of something, you need a reference point to measure from, and the Earth is not a perfect sphere. Also, Earth’s water is always in motion which means their heights are constantly changing. If the Earth were perfectly spherical, homogeneous in density, and weren’t affected by weather or tides, the level of water above the Earth’s surface would be pretty uniform and the average would be easy to calculate. But the Earth’s shape isn’t uniform and it’s constantly affected by temperature, pressure, wind and even tidal forces from the moon and the sun. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcpFpxQrLB8] Imagine you have a ruler and you’re tasked with measuring the height of the ocean at a beach. That height would change by the second due to waves, by the hour because of tides, and even by the week depending on where the Earth was in its orbit around the sun. Geodesists, mathematicians who measure and monitor the Earth’s size and shape and the exact locations of points on its surface, have tackled the challenge of determining the Earth’s global sea level. In order to do this, they had to first come up with a model for the exact size and shape of the Earth. Combining this model with measurements from satellites like Jason-3, scientists can calculate both the shape and the height of the global sea level surface. The global sea level is then used as the point of zero elevation and becomes our reference point for determining heights of mountains, the depths of trenches, and even altitudes of objects in space. Because the Earth isn’t a simple surface like a sphere, the line of global sea level isn’t simple either. It has slight hills and valleys similar to the surface of land. Jason-3 is part of NOAA and NASA’s effort to continuously monitor sea levels over time. Jason-3 is actually nearly identical to the two Jason satellites, Jason-1 and Jason-2, that came before it, all of which are named after the Greek mythological hero who was an explorer of the seas. In a recent , Jason-3 scientists stated that the similarity between the satellites was a good thing because “we’re trying to build a climate record here so the science benefits from the satellites being as similar as possible.” The main reason the previous satellites needed to retire is because of radiation exposure. They orbit at an altitude of 1,136 km, which is high enough to receive almost no protection from the Earth’s atmosphere. The instruments get bombarded with harmful radiation and need to be replaced after a few years. The Jason-3 scientists noted that the lifetime of the Jason-2 satellite was set to five years for this reason. Once Jason-3 is launched, NOAA and NASA will move Jason-2 to a new orbit, allowing Jason-3 to take its place. Having an accurate, up-to-date measurement of the global sea level is important for maintaining a standard of measurement on the Earth. And because of climate change, the global sea level is changing. Jason-3 will give scientists a constant picture of how the sea level is changing around the world. This in turn can help other scientists forecast things like hurricane intensity, surface waves, tides and currents, and even El Niño and La Niña events. Jason-3 will be launched by SpaceX from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Sunday at 1:42 PM EST. Live coverage will begin at 11:00 AM EST on .
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DraftKings And FanDuel Receive Stay In NY, Can Legally Operate Until Final Ruling
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Fitz Tepper
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Today a panel of New York State Supreme Court appellate judges decided to extend the temporary stay that was recently granted to DraftKings and FanDuel, meaning they can legally operate in NY until their appeal is decided. , In December New York State Supreme Court Judge Manuel Mendez upheld a cease-and-desist request from New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, meaning DraftKings and FanDuel would have to cease operating in New York. However, a few hours after that decision, DraftKings received an expediated motion to appeal and stay the decision, meaning both companies could temporarily continue to operate while the appeal is being considered. Today’s decision extends that temporary ruling, meaning both companies can indefinitely operate in NYC until the appeal until decided. In a statement from DraftKing’s counsel, the company reiterated that they expect the appeal to be decided in their favor, and consider today’s ruling a logical step in getting DFS legalized: “We are pleased with the Court’s ruling today. Daily Fantasy Sports contests are as legal now as they have been for the past seven years that New Yorkers have been playing them. As our litigation continues, we expect an appellate court to see what we have known since the outset: DFS is a game of knowledge and skill, one that builds community and whose competitive spirit has become important to the lives of millions of people. Our ongoing appeal will make clear that daily fantasy contests require just as much skill as season-long contests, which the Attorney General recognizes as perfectly legal under state law. – David Boies, counsel to DraftKings and Chairman, Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP Now, all parties must wait until the appeal is heard before the New York Supreme Court later this year. Until then, DraftKings and FanDuel live to fight another day in NY.
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T-Mobile CEO Apologizes For “Offending” EFF And Its Supporters
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Drew Olanoff
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After an aggressive response to his company, T-Mobile, being called out for being anti-net neutrality on its new “Binge On” product by the EFF, CEO John Legere has backtracked a bit. In case you missed it, during a Twitter Q&A last week. EFF supporters told him. In droves. Here was today, which is, of course, still mainly in defense of Binge On: Look, by now you know that I am a vocal, animated and sometimes foul mouthed CEO. I don’t filter myself and you know that no one at T-Mobile filters me either (no, they don’t even try). That means I will sometimes incite a bit of a ‘social media riot’, but I’m not going to apologize for that. I will however apologize for offending EFF and its supporters. Just because we don’t completely agree on all aspects of Binge On doesn’t mean I don’t see how they fight for consumers. We both agree that it is important to protect consumers’ rights and to give consumers value. We have that in common, so more power to them. As I mentioned last week, we look forward to sitting down and talking with the EFF and that is a step we will definitely take. Unfortunately, my color commentary from last week is now drowning out the real value of Binge On – so hopefully this letter will help make that clear again. Legere rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but the carrier business is an ugly one, so it takes quite a bit to stand out from the noise of it all. He did it, it worked. And, well, we have an apology and more discussion on whether Binge On is throttling or smart and helpful for consumers. Ultimately, you’re the judge.
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Interest Rates, Unicorns And What The Fed Means To Silicon Valley
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Bill Reichert
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Most citizens of Silicon Valley see the drama around the Fed’s activities as only marginally relevant to innovation and entrepreneurship. But three big macroeconomic forces have supported, if not driven, the extraordinary growth of Silicon Valley startups over the past several years, and changes in these forces could have a dramatic impact on Silicon Valley and other startup hubs. Of course, macroeconomic trends have always had an impact on startup fundraising and venture capital investment. Interest rates, commodity prices, currency rates, and regional economic growth rates are all relevant to the investment climate. But lately Silicon Valley has seemed insulated from this reality. If you joined the startup world in the past five years, you might think that the explosion of new companies, new venture funds, and new unicorns is just the natural order of things. Now, changes in these macroeconomic forces — starting with the interest rate hike — could have a dramatic impact on Silicon Valley and other regions. First, the extended era of low interest rates has pushed asset managers to seek out new opportunities for return. Traditionally, economists talk about “easy money” spurring increased business investment, but venture capital is not particularly sensitive to interest rates directly. The impact of low interest rates has been indirect. Asset managers seeking higher rates of return saw an opportunity in the venture capital asset class, and so we saw a bunch of new investors jump into the space who were not commonly considered players in venture capital — massive firms like Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments. Great news, right? Well, the problem is that venture capital is actually a very tiny asset class. The main asset classes, like public equities, bonds, real estate, commodities, and currencies make venture capital look like a kindergarten sandbox in comparison. Each year, tens of billions of dollars go to venture capital investments. By comparison, each year tens of of dollars go to stock market or bond market investments. Goldman Sachs alone has over $1 trillion of “other people’s money” under management. That’s probably ten times more than the entire U.S. venture capital industry. So if only a tiny bit of money flows out of one of the major asset classes into the venture capital market, it can have a huge distorting effect. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen over the past five years. Venture capital investing has expanded dramatically as this “trickle” of money — only tens of billions of dollars — has shifted from low-return assets to venture capital. The majority of this new money has come in the form of “late stage” investing and corporate investing. The result? Unicorns! When more money chases a limited stock of investment opportunities, prices (in this case, valuations) go up. Second, compounding this run up in asset prices is the appreciation of the dollar on the global currency markets. Because the world was anticipating an increase in U.S. interest rates, the value of the dollar has been increasing for the past two years, since the Fed started signaling that it would eventually raise rates. Historically, an increase in the value of the U.S. dollar tends to correlate with a decrease in commodity prices. So global asset managers tend to shift assets out of commodities, like gold and oil. This accelerates the above problem of money managers chasing returns. This disparity in global pricing is not lost on startup companies. Entrepreneurs in Europe and elsewhere see that their counterparts in the U.S. are getting investor valuations that are sometimes 2x to 5x higher than anyone in their local markets can get. Not to mention the harsh reality that in most parts of the world, the venture capital base is very thin. So every day, on pretty much every plane landing at San Francisco International, another team of entrepreneurs arrives in Silicon Valley to seek out their fame and fortune. Third, the slowdown in global industrial growth has, ironically, added to the unicorn phenomenon. Corporations all over the world have discovered that most of the low-hanging fruit from the last thirty years of global growth have been plucked, and continued growth is going to get harder and harder. As a result, corporations have embraced the concept of “open innovation,” which means buying growth rather than inventing it yourself. This has prompted a thundering herd of corporate venture capital groups to set up shop in Silicon Valley and partner with startups who might otherwise disrupt them out of business. All this has been great for Silicon Valley. At least, as long as you are participating in the increase in jobs, salaries, and equity. (If your only exposure to the ebullience is increased traffic and rent, it’s not so much fun.) So now the big question is, when will the music stop? Will an increase in interest rates reverse the flows? We have learned that markets are driven by expectations: Buy on the rumor, sell on the news. As interest rates go up, and rumor becomes news, will the flow of assets into venture capital reverse? Will the prices of unicorns come down? It is very hard to see how the trend of the last few years can be sustained. Already we can see that the public markets can’t possibly absorb all the unicorns at their current prices. And very few unicorns can get comparable prices from corporate acquisition. Meanwhile, the overwhelming bulk of the returns that venture capital firms are reporting to their limited partner investors are “unrealized” returns — increased valuations on paper that have not yet turned into cold, hard cash. The most likely path forward, or maybe it is just the most hoped-for path, is a series of modest disappointments as valuations deflate. But even at half their valuations, almost all the unicorns and their lesser brethren (companies worth only a few hundred million dollars) will generate very nice returns for most of their venture capital investors. Some late stage investors will get burned — those that didn’t negotiate a ratchet in their investment agreements. The flow of money into venture capital will weaken, and it will get harder for everyone, investors and entrepreneurs alike. But innovation and disruption will continue, and investors will still chase the next big things. Where does that leave venture investors? A few will still do well. Those that have focused on companies with real core value, with novel technology and a sustainable competitive advantage, will stand to benefit as these companies mature into a later-stage environment now cleared of overinflated expectations. Entrepreneurs who are hoping to raise a few hundred million dollars and play with the unicorns will be sadly disappointed. With luck, the markets will not overreact in the other direction, and solid, disciplined execution will once again be rewarded.
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Hype Or Not, Peach Hit The Top 10 Social Networking App List Fast
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Drew Olanoff
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You’ve probably heard quite a bit about . Some say it’s dumb, some say it’s great, and a lot say something in between. What do I feel about it? It feels fresh. Fresh in a way that Twitter, Path, WhatsApp and Messenger doesn’t feel. Mind you, it’s on a massive hype-train right now so take it all with a grain of salt. But by all means, please do give it a try. No need to let cynicism stop you from giving it a shot. Speaking of which, it seems like a lot of people are doing just that: Peach is currently at #120 overall on Apple’s App Store in the US for free apps, and is #9 in social networking (along with some pretty good company.) Instead of thinking of the rise as a “hype” or “bust” moment, it signals to me that there are sets of folks out there willing to try new things. We haven’t hit peak consumer apps as of yet. So as much as Snapchat continues to catch fire and Messenger gets smarter, there’s a need — or want — for something “else.” I’ve been using Peach all weekend and the best I can tell is the key is to not add a ton of people to your graph, as the more intimate the communication is, the better. There’s also a sense of accomplishment you feel once you get a hang of its “Magic Words,” its command-line interface to share different pieces of content within the app. It’ll be fun to see what other commands get added. I’m also having fun with taking photos in a way that feels like an animation, video or Facebook Boomerang: Groundbreaking? No. New? Fresh? Yes. Once an app hits a category top 10 there’s an organic thing that happens where those who don’t read tech Twitter or tech press gets a hold of it.
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“Elephant in the Valley” Survey Sheds Light On Issues Women Face In Tech
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Inspired by the conversation that came out of the Ellen Pao versus Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers trial, the creators of a new survey, “ ,” asked over 200 women in tech — all with at least ten years worth of experience and the vast majority (91%) living in the San Francisco Bay Area — about what it’s been like working in the industry. “What we realized is that while many women shared similar workplace stories, most men were simply shocked and unaware of the issues facing women in the workplace,” . “In an effort to correct the massive information disparity, we decided to get the data and the stories.” The survey focused on feedback and promotions, inclusion, unconscious biases, motherhood, and harassment and safety. On the survey’s website, you can see the results, as well as read anonymous stories submitted by women in tech. One of the more disturbing stats is around sexual harassment. Of those surveyed, 60% said they reported unwanted sexual advances, with one in three women having felt afraid of their personal safety because of circumstances at work. “I had a fellow VC sending me flowers, gifts, even a mix-tape, over the course of several months,” . “Another portfolio CEO asked me to go through a door first so he could ‘watch me walk’ and my superiors at the firm told me to laugh it off. I also had another VC tell me likes married women and put his hand on mine. (I’m married).” Here are some other stats that stood out: Around the impact of family, one women said that an interviewers asked if she would have time for the job, “given that you are a mom with a young child.” Another woman said someone asked her, “how do we know you’re not going to run off and have a baby?” Be sure to . There’s also a with two of the study’s co-authors, Vassallo and Madansky.
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Slack Appoints Company’s First Chief Security Officer And Chief Architect
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Lucas Matney
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Slack just slated a former Palantir exec for its new Chief Security Officer position and an Ex-Facebook employee, who worked on the company’s AI efforts, for its newly created role of Chief Architect. Geoff Belknap will be filling the role of Chief Security Officer at the popular office chat client. He previously worked as the Chief Information Security Officer of Palantir, a company that prioritizes security quite a bit thanks to its highly sensitive clientele. At Slack he will be devoting himself to physical and information security at the company in addition to overall security policy. The new role of Chief Architect will be filled by Keith Adams, whose main responsibility will be Slack’s overall technical architecture and the technologies that compose it. Adams is joining Slack after nearly 7 years at Facebook, where, among other things, he co-founded Facebook’s AI Research. A position where, according to his , he was responsible for “engineering systems that can learn from Facebook’s enormous piece of the visual, textual, acoustic, and social worlds.” Adams also previously worked as a Senior Staff Engineer at VMWare. It’s an interesting hire that comes at a time when Slack may be getting more serious about the artificial intelligence of their systems and features like Slackbot, which Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield he wanted to see get significantly smarter. A representative from Slack told me in an email that while Adams role would be focused on the overall technical architecture of Slack’s platforms and systems, he would likely also be working on endeavors involving the company’s AI and machine learning efforts. Slack has been growing insanely quickly since its founding just three years ago. The company has raised just shy of $340 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and Accel, , and the company now . These new positions will undoubtedly help the company maintain security and stability as the company rapidly scales.
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Puppy Bowl Comes To Virtual Reality
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Drew Olanoff
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Just like the Super Bowl, Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl has become a tradition in my household. Every single year we’re treated to the most fluffy, cuddle-up-to-ity pups of all time. This year, Puppy Bowl XII will have a ton of extras in 360 degree video. Long live virtual reality. This year, the event will feature 84 puppies from 44 rescues across the United States and will represent “Team Ruff” and “Team Fluff.” Sure, it’s not a real sport, but hot damn is it cute. It kicks off on February 7th at 3PM PT. Simply grab your Google Cardboard, or other VR viewer, and go to , the Samsung Milk VR app, or grab the Discovery VR and apps. Pure genius. Get up close and personal with the most adorable pups in the world.
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Ford Launches New Programs To Make Driving And Car Ownership Less Of A Hassle
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Frederic Lardinois
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Ford announced a number of today that all aim to make driving and owning a car a little bit easier for Ford and non-Ford drivers alike. At the core of these new programs is — which at first glance looks like it’s an OnHub on steroids (with an additional smartphone app). Among other things, this program will let you call so-called FordGuides for help with all of your mobility problems, including parking bookings, for example. In addition, it will feature a smartphone app that will also let you book and pay for parking, and earn perks for using it. The service will be available to anybody, including non-Ford drivers. That’s a smart branding move. As a part of this program, Ford also plans to open a couple of company-owned urban stores in New York, San Francisco, London and Shanghai. These are not company-owned dealerships, but more like Tesla’s mall stores where potential buyers can learn more about Ford, its vehicles and — increasingly — its services. “These aren’t places where we’re trying to sell something,” said Stephen Odell, Ford’s executive VP for Global Marking Sales and Service. “We want to hear people’s thoughts, and we want to show them what we’re doing to solve the transportation issues of today and tomorrow – and not just in their city, but around the world.” Ford also today announced that it is working with IBM to launch a new data analysis platform for analyzing transportation data. This new platform will use to analyze small slices of data to look for patterns and trends that could help drivers make better decisions about their driving — or whether they should maybe use another . Ford says it is already using this platform to power its “ ” pilot in its campus in Dearborn, Michigan. “Should one of the Transit vans experience a malfunction that triggers a warning light, the platform will be able to start routing requests away from that vehicle to other Transits in service – allowing another shuttle to redeploy to keep all riders on schedule,” the company explains. Similarly, Ford is using the platform to predict parking space availability through its GoPark Painless Parking program. “Ford’s Smart Mobility Experimentation Platform takes huge amounts of information and breaks it down to help consumers have better travel experiences,” said Rich Strader, Ford director, enterprise and emerging information technology, in today’s announcement. In addition to its work with IBM, Ford is also launching a new Wearables Research Lab for looking at how to integrate wearables with cars. If you had a bad night of sleep, for example, your adaptive cruise control could set a longer distance between you and the car you are following for example, to give you more time to sleep. And because nothing would make transportation easier than self-driving cars (or maybe we’ll just call them ‘pods’ in the future), Ford also today announced that it is testing its autonomous vehicles . Before you can do all of this, though, you first have to own a car. Ford is launching a new pilot program today that re-imagines car ownership as a shared experience. Its new leasing pilot now allows families, friends and neighbors to and reserve drive time.
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Apple Rolls Out New Betas Across Its Platforms
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Sarah Perez
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Happy Monday from Apple! The company has just rolled out for each of its platforms, including desktop (El Capitan 10.11.4), mobile (iOS 9.3), Apple TV (tvOS 9.2), and Apple Watch (watchOS 2.2). Beta releases for Apple Configurator 2.2 and also became available at the same time. Some of the standout features included in the upgrades is the new ability to support the pairing of multiple Apple Watches to a single iPhone, a new Maps experience in watchOS, a “Night Shift” mode in iOS for better nighttime reading, an upgraded Notes app with Touch ID support, a better Health app, new features for Education users, and more. One of the more interesting in iOS 9.3 is “Night Shift” – a feature that will slowly shift the iOS device’s color palette at nighttime to eliminate the issues with blue light and its ability to interrupt our natural sleep patterns. and also recently did the same thing, though Apple users may be more familiar with the feature thanks to an app called for Mac devices, and Explains Apple on its , “Night Shift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation to determine when it’s sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes. In the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings.” That is, when it gets later in the day, the device will automatically make its adjustments. This, apparently, has become a new standard feature for mobile devices, as more users today read on their phones and tablets before bed, but then face sleep disturbances. With Amazon and Apple now both offering this sort of setting on their platforms, they’re likely establishing a new baseline for competitors, as well. The Notes app also has been upgraded to include support for Touch ID – meaning you can secure access to the app, where a number of people casually record things like medical details and passwords. Now you’ll be able to make it so you have to enter in a passcode or use your fingerprint to launch Notes, depending on your preference. You can also sort your notes by date created, date modified, or alphabetically, says Apple. Apple’s News app has been more personalized in iOS 9.3 with more suggestions for things like trending topics and Editor’s Picks. Plus, it now plays video in your feed, is a little speedier, and supports landscape mode on iPhone. Meanwhile, the Health app is now making it easier for you to find third-party health apps, as categories like Weight, Workouts, and Sleep have a new slider menu that help point you to related App Store apps. It also now displays your move, exercise and stand data, plus goals, from your Apple Watch. in 9.3 received a couple of new features, including “New” and “For You” recommendations from Apple Music, and a “Nearby” feature from Maps will now help you find gas, parking, restaurants and more. More importantly, , as the upgraded software introduces more features that make iOS in the classroom setting a better experience, including the addition of a single portal for school admins called “Apple School Manager”, support for a new kind of ID for education called “Managed Apple IDs,” a new Classroom app for teachers, and support for a Shared iPad for students. The focus here is on offering schools, admins and teachers more tools for using Apple devices in the classroom, ranging from the School Manager dashboard where admins can shop apps and prep devices for MDM (mobile device management) to tools that let students log into an iPad in the classroom to make it their own. Hopefully, this multi-account support is something that could make its over to the consumer side in the future, as families often share a device – like an iPad shared with kids – but don’t have a way to create separate profiles or personal experiences. [gallery ids="1260890,1260872"] Meanwhile, on watchOS, there’s the above-mentioned support for pairing multiple watches with a single iOS device, which requires iOS to be also running iOS 9.3 Plus, the Maps app and glance now offers quick directions to a location, the ability perform searches, and the ability to view nearby points of interest. A new Nearby feature also makes it easy for users to browse through categories such as Food, Drinks, Shopping, Travel, and Health, and find the closest places in each category. Tapping a category will give you additional options, like Nightlife, Music & Drama, Parks & Recreation, and Movies options in the Fun category. WatchOS 2.2 also delivers an upgraded Core Text framework, which allows for complex text layout and rendering graphics contexts, and includes an upgrade to the HealthKit framework, which now includes a summary of the user’s activity for the day (e.g. stand hours, time spent exercising, active energy burned.) With , the platform is also getting a ton of new features, including support for pairing Bluetooth keyboards, the ability to move apps into folders on the homescreen, a new App Switcher interface, and its own Podcasts app. The will look familiar to those who use the iPhone version, as it also offers tabs for Unplayed, My Podcasts, Featured, Top Charts and Search. [gallery ids="1260901,1260902,1260903"] Rolling out folder support for Apple TV indicates that Apple is already thinking about the user experience, and making it easier to get to favorite apps without a lot of scrolling. The feature works similarly to that on iOS devices – you press the Play/Pause button to move the apps to folders or delete them. Siri also now speaks Spanish (U.S.) and French Canadian. The OS X beta is more of an incremental release, compared with that of iOS or even watchOS. According to release text, it will focus on stability, compatibility, and security improvements.
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Meet The Startups Vying For The Crunchie For Best New Startup Of 2015
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Matt Burns
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As the event draws near, we’ll be featuring the finalists in each of the 12 categories up for grabs, starting with the nominees for one of the most prolific awards — the Best New Startup of 2015. Here are the companies that have been selected as finalists for this coveted prize, as well as a look back at those companies who have won this award in previous years.
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Netflix CEO Says Account Sharing Is OK
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Sarah Perez
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Remember when ? Well, apparently, Netflix feels the same way. In an under-the-radar announcement from last week’s CES – likely dwarfed by news of Netflix’s – Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that consumers sharing Netflix account information was “a positive thing.” Account sharing is generally a gray area in the world of online streaming. People are unsure if they’re breaking the rules, , if they log in using someone else’s account information. But for the operators of streaming services, account sharing isn’t always looked down upon, as HBO’s president Richard Plepler made clear. Instead, he saw this sort of activity as a “terrific marketing vehicle” for the next generation of viewers, saying that his network was in the business of “building addicts,” and it did that by exposing its product, brand and shows to more people. On a similar note, Hastings that people who share someone else’s Netflix account often go on to become paying subscribers themselves at a later date, CNET reported. “We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch,,” Hastings said. “That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.” To illustrate this example, he spoke of how a parent may share their login with their child. And when that child grows up, they will usually subscribe to Netflix, too. Given that Netflix already supports family accounts where each member can have their own profile, it’s interesting to hear that the CEO is still okay with account-sharing as an alternative to upgraded accounts where more users can sign in on multiple devices at the same time. It seems that subscribing to your own Netflix account is just another coming-of-age milestone for today’s young adults, in the CEO’s mind. “As kids move on in their life, they like to have control of their life, and as they have an income, we see them separately subscribe,” Hastings reporters at CES. “It really hasn’t been a problem.” While Hastings didn’t directly address how he feels about non-family members sharing their credentials – such as in the case where friends or roommates may split an account – it’s clear that the company’s consumer-friendly position is more focused on getting people addicted to its content in the hopes they’ll later becoming paying customers – just like HBO wanted, too. Of course, Hastings may not see the need for an immediate crackdown on password-sharing today. After all, Netflix still has plenty of room to grow, particularly as it enters new markets. The company’s big CES news was that it’s moving , including notable regions like India and Russia. That means the service, which boasts 70 million paying customers, is now live in over 190 countries worldwide.
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Fitbit’s Post-Smartwatch Announcement Crash Marches On, Dropping Another 10%
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Matthew Lynley
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Fitbit is already not having a good week. After unveiling a new smartwatch at CES last week, . But things have only gotten worse for the fitness tracking device-focused company, with its shares dropping another 10% in trading today. The stock fell as much as 13% during the day, bringing it to an all-time low. As we noted last week, this seems to be a continued lack of confidence in the company as it looks to enter the smartwatch market. This is a hyper-competitive space on both the low-end, with the Pebble smartwatches, and the high-end with the Apple Watch and other watches powered by Android. Fitbit, previously primarily focused on less-expensive and popular fitness trackers, is now diverging from its core strategy as it enters the smartwatch market. All this isn’t good news for the company. Having a well-performing stock isn’t just important for pleasing investors — it is also a key element of attracting talent, as the company can entice in potential recruits with the allure of well-performing shares in addition to a strong salary. [graphiq id=”lYlMdh7OYhn” title=”Fitbit Inc. (FIT) Stock Price – Current Day” width=”600″ height=”575″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/lYlMdh7OYhn” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/17807102/Fitbit-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Fitbit Inc. (FIT) Stock Price – Current Day | FindTheCompany”] Over just the past few days, shares of Fitbit have dropped more than 35%. This new drop today brings Fitbit, formerly one of the most-successful IPOs of 2015, to another all-time low. The stock had a bit of a rocky year, ending around the price of its first year of trading, but was still up considerably from its IPO price of $20 by the end of the year. Now the company is trading below that, hitting $18.69 in regular trading on Monday. [graphiq id=”iVnUbNbrKsJ” title=”GoPro Inc. (GPRO) Stock Price – 2 Years” width=”600″ height=”487″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/iVnUbNbrKsJ” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/12123149/GoPro-Inc-in-San-Mateo-CA” link_text=”GoPro Inc. (GPRO) Stock Price – 2 Years | FindTheCompany”] Etsy is also having a pretty bad day, hitting an all-time low of its own. [graphiq id=”kWYqdEqII85″ title=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price – Current Day” width=”600″ height=”575″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/kWYqdEqII85″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/16266642/Etsy-Inc-in-Brooklyn-NY” link_text=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price – Current Day | FindTheCompany”] One other thing worth noting: Twitter. It’s not down particularly sharply today, but the company is still skirting all-time lows. Since the company’s last earnings report, Twitter has seen a slow march south. [graphiq id=”3nVsK9aIHfT” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 2 Years” width=”600″ height=”487″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/3nVsK9aIHfT” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 2 Years | FindTheCompany”] But some of the larger technology companies are having OK days thus far, so it doesn’t seem to be an issue with technology across the board. If anything, these companies are more recently public, meaning they could be a little more volatile as they figure out their respective game plans — especially when it comes to hard, concrete product pipelines. With all of these companies shares continuing to fall, that brings up another question — will they become acquisition targets? It’s hard to tell right now, but if the trend continues, a company like Fitbit might turn out to look like a bargain to larger companies looking to snap up a big hardware platform play.
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Matthew Lynley
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MesoGlue Is A Metallic Glue That Replaces Hot Solder
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John Biggs
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If you’ve ever soldered or welded, you’ll know that things get pretty hot. intends to fix that. It’s a room-temperature metallic glue that lets you stick parts together with reckless abandon and electrical control. The most interesting part of the entire system is that it allows us to solder parts onto boards which will lead to press-fit electronics which, in short, is an amazing development. These sorts of things are still fairly uncommon and the fact that it works at all should do much to improve the growth of DIY electronics and even reduce the energy needed to solder PCBs en massed. The MesoGlue Silver looks and acts like regular silver solder and you can even use the glue to attach chips to heatsinks permanently without thermal paste, a boon for high-performance computing folks. It’s a really cool technology that may change the way we make electronics. Founded by Prof. Hanchen Huang and Paul Elliott of Northeastern University along with Prof. Stephen Stagon of the University of North Florida, the company is still in its early stages but should be ready to rock and roll soon. “Both ‘metal’ and ‘glue’ are familiar terms to most people, but their combination is new and made possible by unique properties of metallic nanorods–infinitesimally small rods with metal cores that we have coated with the element indium on one side and galium on the other. These coated rods are arranged along a substrate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom ‘comb’ and a top ‘comb.'” said Huang. “We then interlace the ‘teeth.’ When indium and gallium touch each other, they form a liquid. The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue provides the strength and thermal/electrical conductance of a metal bond. We recently received a new provisional patent for this development through Northeastern University.” “The metallic glue has multiple applications, many of them in the electronics industry. As a heat conductor, it may replace the thermal grease currently being used, and as an electrical conductor, it may replace today’s solders. Particular products include solar cells, pipe fittings, and components for computers and mobile devices,” he It it saves me from burning my little fingers while making an electronic clock, I’m all in. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=QAr1vW46Jf8]
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HTC Vive Pre-Orders Will Open On February 29
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Natasha Lomas
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The HTC- partnership, which to reveal the pair working on a virtual reality experience called Vive, continues to push towards a consumer release — with their VR headset slated to ship in — hotfooting it after rival headset Oculus Rift, . HTC has now confirmed it will be opening up pre-orders for Vive on February 29. It has yet to announce the pricing for the consumer Vive headset — but we’ll presumably find out at the end of next month. In an interview with , CEO Cher Wang said the smartphone maker has refocused its efforts away from phones — dubbing VR “more important”. And even hinting it might be contemplating a retreat from building typical smartphones entirely in the not too distant future. The Taiwanese company has certainly in an increasingly crowded Android OEM phone space in recent years. And while there are some big bets being placed on VR — by the likes of Facebook-owned Oculus and PlayStation maker Sony, to name two — there are still far fewer players at this nascent stage, making it a relatively uncontested arena for HTC to play in. However that’s in no small part because, unlike smartphones, consumer demand for VR is unproven. And high profile bets or not, the question of whether a notoriously tricky technology can be made to stick this time around remains very unclear. Yet, even with that virtual fog on the horizon, HTC is apparently calculating there is a higher potential success rate for it in VR than in sweating to compete with the slick marketing machinery of smartphone rivals like Apple and Xiaomi. Which perhaps says more about the reality of the smartphone market (where either brand or affordability take all) than it does about the promise of VR. “Now we are more realistic,” Wang told the newspaper, when asked if HTC would fold up its smartphone business this year. “We feel that we should apply our best design to different type of sectors. Yes, smartphones are important, but to create a natural extension to other connected devices like wearables and virtual reality is more important. “We have a vision of smartphones with different types of form factors, it won’t always look like this.” “With virtual reality, technology becomes limitless. You can inhabit a different world with a head mount. Think how it could change surgery, education, science, even shopping,” she added, taking a rose-tinted view of what VR could be (as well she must). For its part, rival Oculus opened up last week, finally revealing a consumer price-tag that’s $1 short of $600 — and that the headset is not priced to reach the mainstream. Not least because consumers also need a powerful enough PC to power the Rift (or the Vive), so that’s another circa $1,000+ worth of required hardware to factor in to the all-in VR cost. One new detail that emerged about the Vive at CES is the headset has been tweaked to include a front-facing camera, — with the tech capable of blending real-world objects into a virtual environment, rather than simply offering the pure escapism of VR. Whether ‘hybrid reality’ proves any more compelling to the average consumer than pure-play VR remains to be seen. But 2016 should at least deliver an early verdict on the latest VR reboot.
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The Mobile App Divide
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Michael Kende
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Closing the digital divide requires not just providing Internet access for all, but making sure that access enables opportunities for all. Internet access can allow entrepreneurs to turn their inspiration into innovation, and their innovation into income. Mobile apps, which run on smart devices, represent in many ways an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs, but also highlight another barrier even for those who are already online. The app economy is perhaps the easiest e-commerce avenue – once an app is created, the developer only has to upload it to an app store which takes care of the rest: worldwide sales, storage, discovery, distribution, delivery, and payments when relevant. App sales are easier than traditional online sales which require the development of a website, a payment mechanism and distribution, not to mention the sale of physical goods require shipments. The first mobile app store was introduced by Apple only seven years ago, and apps are now the main way that many interact with the Internet via a wide variety of smart devices including phones and tablets. This popularity has produced an app economy worth multi billions of dollars, generating jobs and income around the world. However, the opportunity is not available to all. In developed countries, users have a choice of more than a million apps, across multiple platforms, which have been downloaded well over one hundred billion times, and app developers have access to a market of well over a billion users, earning billions in revenue from paid downloads, in-app purchases, and advertising. By contrast in Sub-Saharan Africa, in only one country – Nigeria – can users and developers buy and sell apps as in any developed country. Using Google Play availability in Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, the diagram below highlights the app divide. In 22 countries users are able to download free and paid apps, but developers can only make free apps. In another five countries, there are further restrictions on the ability to use apps or make them available. In the remaining 23 countries developers have no options, and it is not clear whether users can even download free apps. This app divide springs from a general problem with international payments to and from developing countries, which restricts the ability and willingness of app stores to provide payment options for users or developers. The payments issue also restricts the use of other innovative online services important to entrepreneurs, including PayPal, for general e-commerce, and Kickstarter, for crowd-funding new innovations. The reasons behind the absence of international payments are complicated, opaque, and not consistent from country to country, and must be addressed. Multiple stakeholders including governments, financial institutions, and the private sector must work together to expand the markets for developers to create apps and for users to be able to download them. Overall, the result leaves a picture of significant lost opportunity: on the one hand, the apps that many people use every day are not available to all; on the other hand, the marketplace for developers to earn their living is also not available. As we focus on closing the digital divide for access, it is important to also close this app divide to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from the app economy.
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The White House Joins Snapchat
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Sarah Perez
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After expanding access to President Obama’s State of the Union address by , the White House is now targeting the younger demographic with the launch of an official account on social media service Snapchat. White House’s director of product management Josh Miller – including over 100 million daily actives, 60+ percent of whom are between the ages of 13 and 34 – as part of the reasoning behind the launch of the new account. Starting tomorrow, the White House will post to its Official Story, offering Snapchat users a behind-the-scenes look at the State of the Union prep, including additional footage and camera angles not offering through other channels, including TV broadcasts, its YouTube channel, or elsewhere. However, there’s content available on the account today, available under the username “WhiteHouse,” including a brief video from the Oval Office. The White House, of course, is no stranger to embracing social media, having already established a presence on , Twitter (including the ), and it has posted live GIFs on , short videos on , and photos on . The White House also in the past, and – something it’s now . However, the addition of Snapchat into this social media mix is another indication of the app’s growing importance in the media world – especially when it comes to reaching the youngest, highly mobile users who don’t tend to consume media through traditional means, like newspapers, magazines, or even radio or TV. While a core group of Snapchat’s audience may not be old enough to even vote yet, there’s no harm in engaging with them ahead of that day in order to influence their still-forming political opinions. According to data from , Snapchat is now the #3 network for teens, behind Facebook and Instagram, with 41 percent of teens 13 to 17 using the platform. It also appeals to young adults – and in particular those of college age, where, 4 out of 5 college students are now using the app. While once known best as the “disappearing” messaging service, Snapchat has since successfully expanded beyond its ephemeral messaging roots to develop a social platform for sharing content in a more authentic way. That is, it’s a place where users aren’t competing to rack up likes, hearts, or where user profiles publicly boast their followers, or video view counts, as Justin.tv and Twitch.tv co-founder Justin Khan , describing Snapchat’s appeal. In particular, Snapchat’s Stories feature is a becoming one of the app’s go-to draws. These short-form, mobile-friendly media collections have grown over time to attract millions of users. Live Stories, for example – meaning the photo and video montages that offer live looks at events – are capable of drawing in an audience of 20 million in 24 hours, In the political arena, Hillary Clinton previously used the format to document her presidential campaign rally. As for the new White House Snapchat account, the launch is a continuation of the company’s efforts at “ ” – that is, on the social media platforms they use, Miller . “In light of the number of Americans who use the service to consume news and share with their friends, the White House is joining Snapchat to engage this broad cross-section of the population in new and creative ways,” Miller says.
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Small Businesses Need Quick Action On Safe Harbor
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Robi Ganguly
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With a January 31 deadline looming and the languishing in the Senate, it is imperative for Congress to act quickly to take an important step in finding a replacement for and ensuring that small digital businesses can continue to operate in Europe. Following a citizen complaint involving Facebook, the in October that the US-EU Safe Harbor agreement, in place since 2000, was invalid. The immediate focus was understandably on the large tech companies that handle massive amounts of data: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.; the impact on smaller companies that also depend on data, is being overlooked. In many ways, rapidly implementing a new Safe Harbor agreement is far more critical for small businesses, and the consumers they serve, than for large companies. The largest global companies have the resources and the ability to negotiate new privacy practices with the myriad national and regional regulatory bodies across Europe. I started my company in 2011, and approximately 10-15 percent of our business is in the European Union. Under the Safe Harbor agreement, we were able to work with companies from EU member states to present users anywhere in the world with an opportunity to provide feedback and trainings. This information collected from users can be transferred to any number of servers around the world, collected and processed in the United States and then shared with our customers in Europe. While doing so, we also comply with rigorous U.S. federal and state privacy regulations. The digital world is truly flat, but the court’s decision fails to recognize this. The result is an attempt to create digital borders – borders that don’t inherently exist in our modern digital world – that prohibit data flows unless your business has the resources and time to have separate agreements with multiple EU state governments. More than relied on the Safe Harbor agreement. Without it, and without clear guidance in place, I do not know how Apptentive will continue to operate in Europe. Starting February 1, 2016, if Germany implements data privacy laws differently than France, it would be nearly impossible for us to decipher which regulatory framework we are required to follow when we curate feedback data from a German user, through a server in the U.S., and deliver it to a French company. can hire teams of lawyers and privacy experts to navigate the labyrinth of regulations, and to ensure compliance across the numerous EU member states and regional jurisdictions. They can build server farms in Europe to circumvent the concerns over transferring data to the U.S., as Microsoft just did. As a small company, these solutions are simply not possible. The U.S. and EU must work quickly to enact a new agreement. To alleviate European concerns, the U.S. Senate should follow the House and pass the Judicial Redress Act, a critical step in repairing the damage done by widespread surveillance by some U.S. government entities. Passing, and ultimately signing into law, the Judicial Redress Act would send a clear signal to our EU allies that the United States is committed to ensuring that the international marketplace remains open to businesses of all stripes and sizes. Without it, small and medium sized businesses will be left out of European markets, a result that is detrimental to American businesses, and consumers around the world. I call on both sides to quickly reach a reasonable agreement that creates a unified regulatory framework that allows companies to operate in Europe.
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Meet The People Vying For The Founder Of The Year Crunchie For 2015
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Henry Pickavet
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Up for grabs are highly coveted Crunchies in 12 categories, and today we’ll be taking a look at the finalists for the Founder of the Year for 2015. This award goes to the individual who has elevated their company to new heights in a competitive market. There are several great individuals up for the award this year, so let’s take a look at them, as well as the ones who have won this award in the past. set out to change the way colleagues communicate when he co-founded Slack in 2013. The popular team communication tool has drawn the attention of a number of investors, including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Social Capital, and raised $340 million. The Slack boss, who recently discussed his company’s , is also popular among his staff. He explaining why he closed the office on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. , a founding partner of Y Combinator, has played a big role in helping launch the careers of many a founder. The accelerator has funded more than 1,000 startups since it launched in 2005, and their companies have a combined valuation of $65 billion. is a founder of , an FDA-approved human genome research outfit founded in 2006 that wants you to know a bit more about your genetic and ancestral makeup. And who wouldn’t want to know that? Despite a with the FDA that saw it temporarily in 2013 only to be last year, the company has raised $227 million from the likes of Genentech, Google Ventures and Wojcicki herself. And thanks to Wojcicki and Co., when people approach me and ask “What are you?” (PSA: please don’t do that), I can say with confidence that I am 60.1 percent European, 39.5 percent Sub-Sarahan African, 0.3 percent East Asian and Native American and 0.2 percent unassigned. founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room forever changing the way we think of “friends”. The two-time Crunchie winner has seen his social enterprise reach more than a billion users, watched the growth of Facebook Video, Instagram and Messenger, as well as newer initiatives surrounding Facebook’s virtual reality company Oculus.
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Tesla Says CEO Elon Musk Just Bought More of The Company
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Connie Loizos
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk thinks shares of his motor company are headed upward. That’s the apparent message reporters received this afternoon from Tesla’s PR machine, which sent out an alert that Musk exercised 532,000 of his options in the company, or about $100 million worth, earlier today. According to an , the options were exercised at $6.63 a piece, which would have produced $98 million for Musk had he sold the shares. They’re currently trading at $191 per share. Of course, Musk, who is for his unwavering belief in his companies, didn’t sell the shares. Instead, he’s hanging on to them and, according to the company, he used more than $50 million in cash to both pay for the options and the taxes incurred from the transaction. Musk now owns roughly one-fifth of Tesla, which is expected to unveil its most affordable car to date, the Model 3, in March. He said earlier this week that it’s “going to be probably the that we make.” (By the way, Bloomberg ran a great feature earlier today about to know about the Model 3 so far.)
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Apple Maps Had Been Directing People Searching For Abortion Clinics To Adoption Centers Since 2011
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Sarah Buhr
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Recent improvements by Apple in Siri and Apple Maps have corrected an ongoing issue where the products had been directing people to adoption centers when they asked for an abortion clinic. Though the company since at least 2011, it said at the time that this was a “glitch” and promised Siri would get better. But not much changed in five years. UCSF researcher Alexis Hoffman tested search results over the past few months across the country and found Siri redirected people to adoption centers in a number of urban areas. Hoffman contacted Apple about it but heard nothing back. Lauren Himiak, an exec with the nonprofit Sea Change Program, which seeks to remove the stigma around abortion, contacted Apple’s Tim Cook about the issue in November 2015 and ran into the same wall. She says she then contacted a number of other Apple people, the PR team and anyone she could find to bring attention to this issue. She also shared with us her search results. “We came into this because it creates a stigma. To have that [search result] in your face is inexcusable.” Himiak told TechCrunch. “We have women all over the country being bullied and shamed and to be redirected to an adoption center instead disregards women’s choices.” Earlier this month did a test search for “abortion” on Apple Maps and asked Siri “where can I find an abortion.” Both searches surfaced an adoption center 30 miles out of the city and zero abortion clinics. However, it looks like search has become more relevant for those interested in finding a place to get an abortion in the last few days. I did my own search on both Siri and Apple Maps today and found it did not direct me to an adoption center. Instead, it pulled up a bunch of locations for Planned Parenthood in SF. Apple told TechCrunch that it had been working on updating search results over time. “With iOS 9, typed search queries deliver more relevant results from more categories,” Apple said. The statement would indicate that this was not due to media attention, like the recent FastCompany article. iOS 9 introduced Apple’s Nearby feature, which provides automated, proximity-based search results. Nearby pulls up those results within categories – one of them being a family services category. Many of the Planned Parenthood locations could have been mis-categorized at the time Nearby was introduced. That’s likely one of the reasons Planned Parenthood and a number of other locations across other categories, like convenience services, pharmacies, cafes, and others, are now displaying more accurate results for iPhone users.
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Is Logistics About To Get Amazon’ed?
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Zvi Schreiber
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In November 2015, Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services . So what? Well, Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services is a subsidiary of none other than . And earlier in the year, had already expanded its presence with air transportation and trucking. entry into the trillion-dollar freight industry can have huge impact on ‘s international sellers, importers and end consumers. But within the context of ‘s modus operandi, it may spell even broader change in one of the world’s largest industries. In the past 20 years, ‘s operating strategy has shifted from online retailer to B2B service provider, offering a stack of critical infrastructure as a service to other businesses. That’s a big part of what’s going on with Web Services, Fulfillment by , and Kindle Direct Publishing…We are creating powerful self-service platforms that allow thousands of people to boldly experiment and accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible or impractical. — Triggered by the drive to please customers or increase market share, ‘s development process follows a clear structure: Identify inefficiencies. Develop a technological solution. Scale the solution into a platform. Offer the platform as a novel solution for third-party businesses. For example, first created an for their own IT, expanding it in-house before offering it to others in the form of Web Services. This same pattern has repeated in other sectors, including payments, e-commerce checkout and retail, as we’ll see below. Crucially, competitors generally do not see the change coming. When the term “cloud computing” was first used , IBM and Microsoft certainly didn’t anticipate that their biggest competitor would be a bookstore! has steadily evolved its retail services over the past 20 years. In cases where operations were initially outsourced, developed in-house, technology-driven solutions. Once successful, these solutions were offered as an external service to third-party businesses. In the online retail world, this process began with providing core e-commerce and packaging services, while wholesalers were responsible for sourcing books and warehousing them. team members would order books from wholesalers and stay up to on the floor of Bezos’ garage. Delivery of the books would be outsourced to companies like UPS, as it still is today. As the e-commerce platform improved, started offering it as a service to third-party vendors in 2000, resulting in the incredibly successful Marketplace. Today, more than account for 40 percent of ’s sales. Scale and improved technology repeated the pattern with more efficient warehousing, leading to the 2006 launch of Fulfillment By (FBA). Along the way, Payments was also launched as a service in 2007, although it has not been particularly successful. An additional service, an e-commerce shopping cart solution called Checkout for , was the next service to launch (2008), although it too never took off. After scaling into services, began broadening its position across the supply chain, beginning with consumer electronics. This is one area where has seen its fair share of flops, including the Fire Phone and the Kindle Fire. While devices like the Kindle are effective as a content distribution strategy, product development has never reached the platform stage. In 2014, continued its expansion across the supply chain by focusing on components that were previously outsourced — first inbound and then, in 2015, home delivery. More than $1 trillion is spent on international freight annually, powering a global fleet of ships, airplanes and trucks that move more than $19 trillion dollars worth of goods across borders every year. Huge ships that carry up to 18,000 shipping containers move 90 percent of everything consumers eat, use and wear (just check the label on your clothes or devices). But the global freight industry is manual and inefficient. This is precisely the sweet spot for ‘s approach of leveraging technology and scale to reduce costs. started by offering for international sellers in 2014, leveraging bulk discounts for cheaper U.S. import rates. Delivery was an even more important nut to crack. The free shipping (and rapid Prime delivery) that delights customers cost more than $4.2 billion dollars in 2014 — nearly 5 percent of net sales. In addition, the lack of control over outsourced processes can also impact customer delight, like the . To reduce operating costs and dependencies on external providers, began to expand the role it played in delivery in 2015. In December 2015, reported was in talks to lease an air fleet, while started appearing on the road. For the first time, the iconic packages were employees, while also launched a service. While this is a brand new business for , no company is better at tech-driven efficiency. More than are a testament to how powerful automation can be in the supply chain. This same drive also explains efforts. In this context, filing to function as a freight forwarder is as logical as it is bold. is entering a notoriously unautomated industry. Just pricing for freight quotes and the industry is renowned for opaque pricing. But ‘s international revenue growth has stagnated, falling to a 12 percent growth in 2014 — modest in terms. Easier and cheaper shipping to sellers globally can revive growth, reduce ’s own and provide more control over processes. has made a habit of extending internal services into third-party services. If successfully reduces fulfillment and costs in-house, it’s unlikely these services will remain limited to use within . As an industry, is ripe for technology-driven disruption. And no company is better at leveraging technology to broaden margins than . and delivery companies should be tracking these early days of ‘s play like hawks. Unless the companies can keep pace with the technological innovation that is likely to deploy, Services may emerge as a new platform in the next decade, unseating existing freight leaders.
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DraftKings And FanDuel Lose A Payment Processor
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Fitz Tepper
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Daily Fantasy Sports sites like DraftKings and FanDuel have been dealt another major blow today, but this time it didn’t come from an attorney general or federal court. Instead, it came from the company that is responsible for processing deposits and withdraws for the millions of players on both sites. In a by the New York Times, , a major payment processor in the entertainment space, said it would “suspend all processing for payment transactions” for clients involved in Daily Fantasy Sports, as of February 29th. The letter to DFS operators references that an “increasing number of state attorneys general have determined that daily fantasy sports (‘D.F.S.’) constitute illegal gambling”. Essentially, the company is saying that the current legal state of DFS is too vague for them to continue operating in the industry, especially since the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 places legal liability on payment processors as well as operators of gambling sites. This means that Vantiv could theoretically be held in contempt by a federal court for processing transactions defined as illegal gambling, even if they were simply processing payments for a site like FanDuel or DraftKings. Interestingly, Vantiv is a public company, and its stock has today. This shows shareholders are likely happy with the decision to exit the risky industry. Now, both companies have exactly a month to find a new payment processor. However, this will be difficult since traditional payment processors are even more risk-adverse than gaming-focused payment processors like Vantiv. This scenario draws parallels to the retail Marijuana industry in legalized states like Colorado and Washington, where banks will refuse to work with any industry players for fear of eventual federal prosecution. Now, it’s a race against the clock for both companies to find a new payment provider before Vantiv suspends its processing on Feb. 29th. UPDATE: DraftKings has provided us with a statement saying that they haven’t heard anything from Vantiv…so it seems like things are still being worked out between the two companies. “We are not aware of what Vantiv may or may not have told other industry participants about its plans. However, to be clear, first, Vantiv has not told DraftKings that it plans to cease fulfilling its contractual obligations as of “Feb 29, 2016” (or any other date). Second, Vantiv is under court order to continue to fulfill its contractual obligation to DraftKings.” – David Boies, Counsel to DraftKings and Chairman, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP:
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Delivery Startup Doorman Adds Support For E-Commerce Returns
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Anthony Ha
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can be a useful service for people who hate missing deliveries. Now it can help you get those products in the mail again, too. Rather than coming home from work to find a “missed delivery” slip, Doorman customers can set a delivery time between 6pm and midnight that’s convenient for them (packages get delivered to Doorman first, and then to the consumer). The new return service works in a similar way — you just schedule a pickup in that same time window. CEO Zander Adell said this was a much-requested feature, particularly for customers who both shop and return regularly with online stores, leaving them with “all of these returns sitting in [their] house” until they found the time to schlep all the boxes to the UPS store. So Doorman started experimenting with making returns available to its $29 per month Gold Plan members last year, then rolled it out to all customers in the latest app update. Adell noted that technically, Doorman customers can use the service for other types of shipping, not just returns — but returns are the most obvious fit for now, since you have to handle the packing and labeling yourself. He also said the company has raised an additional $1.5 million in funding from Matrix Partners, Structure Capital, VGO Ventures and others, doubling the size of that we wrote about in June. “This is a pretty capital-intensive business,” Adell said. “It’s not ‘hook a computer up to the internet and make money’ SaaS model. We really have to prove [to investors] that we can do this efficiently, and we have done that over and over again.” Beyond allowing Doorman to expand geographically (it started in San Francisco, then and New York City), the funding will also help it pursue more retail partnerships — Adell said it’s already working with mattress startup Casper to handle same-day deliveries in San Francisco.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 01.29.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recoding session for today has concluded. Stay tuned after this show for a recording session of G3 at ustream.tv/G3
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Snapchat Challenges Twitter And Facebook For Sports Talk
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Josh Constine
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Possession wins trophies or, in this case, ad dollars. That’s why Snapchat stepped up its game late last year by quietly partnering with Stats.com. Now TechCrunch has learned that Snapchat has rolled new Live Score geofilters at every NBA arena and some other matches. They let anyone attending overlay real-time updated score graphics atop their photos and videos. Just last week, Live Score geofilters saw 20 million views from 51 games. Snapchat is also to produce Live Story compilations from the big games, and Live Score filters are available for those, too. The goal is to become the preferred way people share and consume sports on social media so Snapchat can soak up the ads that follow. It’s a cut-throat competition with Twitter, with Moments and Hashtags, and Facebook with its reach and new Stadium for sports chatter. But both of those networks are focused more on professional content that’s more similar to TV, and text-based discussion of the games. They’re either versions of the first-screen or complementary second-screens. Snapchat is something different. It shows you what it feels like to actually be at the game as a fan. It’s not just about the action on the field, but in the stands, in the parking lot and in the bar afterwards. That makes it appeal to people who don’t care as much about the nitty-gritty of sports, but enjoy the occasional fan experience. That’s a way bigger market. Live Score geofilters also take advantage of Snapchat’s unique feed. On Instagram or Twitter, repeatedly posting about a sports game can be annoying and will drown out everyone else in your friends’ feeds. On Facebook, real-time content often gets lost in the filtered feed. But Snapchat condenses all your posts, no matter how many you share, into a single line in a friends’ Snap inbox or Stories list. It’s pull, not push, social media. Friends only see your posts if they actively look for them. This way, you don’t feel guilty sharing Snaps from the game, and the Live Score, every few minutes. If people don’t want to see it all, they can avoid or fast-forward through it. On Facebook you might post once a day. On Snapchat or Twitter, a few times. But on Snapchat, you can go HAM. Share your pre-game, entrance to the stadium, outfit, seats, the action, the half-time, game-winning play, the celebration and everything after. All Snapchat has to do is convince you what you’re doing is special, and that’s what the Live Score filters do. The real-time sports social media race just heated up.
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15 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week
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Anna Escher
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This week we saw a slew of Twitter executives leave the company, a voluntary Apple product recall, quarterly earnings reports from major tech companies and much, much more. These are the stories you need to catch up on. Matt Burns wrote about the , calling upon founders and entrepreneurs to find fixes for the city’s lead contamination issue. On Sunday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that a slew of top executives had chosen to . We rounded up more of the recent . However not everyone is on their way out; the company confirmed In this week’s Apple news, we learned that Apple made two acquisitions, an and . Apple voluntarily recalled its , and we learned that . We also got a few more clues about what to expect when the iPhone 7 is unveiled. Rumors say that the to take better photos. Everything at Facebook seems to be growing, according to comments Mark Zuckerberg made on the company’s call. Facebook now sees time. Facebook finally brought its new , and in what seemed like a sudden move, . , , , , , , and reported earnings this week. Highlights included Apple’s , Facebook’s climb to 1.59 billion users and , as well as in preparation for the Dell acquisition. Bonus: Matthew Lynley and Katie Roof rounded up their predictions for We sat down with to discuss his new app Parlio, a new social platform promoting civil discourse on today’s issues. Kim-Mai Cutler wrote about how California seems to be half-assing solutions to housing affordability in Why do we keep Matthew Panzarino writes about how no other social media platform engenders the kind of back and forth heated mini-mind competitions that Twitter does. A revealed plans for an upgraded messaging experience that includes audio and video calling and stickers. Ingrid Lunden reported that , closing operations in Mexico and Argentina. Dropbox released a 2015 diversity report, citing some progress around having more women in leadership positions. But the report shows that Dropbox is only . The crazy thing is that these numbers are actually an Let’s hope the company’s 2016 numbers reflect better minority representation. Ron Miller wrote an . Josh Constine reported on . LendUp wants to build a long-standing brand in finance “the right way,” rather than squeezing as much profit as possible from its customers in the short-term. Danny Crichton wrote about how valuations for startups should reflect the risk in building the company, and yet, we have seen pre-launched products reaching a unicorn valuation or higher in More bad news for blood analysis startup Theranos this week. , following news the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said that
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Google Open Sources Its Seesaw Load Balancer
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today that it is open-sourcing Seesaw — a Linux-based load balancing system. The code for the project, which is written in Google’s Go language, is now under the . As Google Joel Sing, who works on the company’s corporate infrastructure, writes in today’s , Google used to use two different load balancing systems back in 2012. Both, however, “presented different sets of management and stability challenges.” So to fix this, he and his team set out to find a new solution and because the ones available at the time didn’t meet Google’s needs, they started writing their own. “The requirements were not exactly complex – we needed the ability to handle traffic for unicast and anycast , perform load balancing with and , and perform adequate health checks against the backends,” Sing writes. “Above all we wanted a platform that allowed for ease of management, including automated deployment of configuration changes.” Because one of the platforms already used the (LVS) for network-level load balancing, the team stuck with this. On top of that, though, Google then implemented a modular multi-process architecture and some failover and recovery services. “After a period of concentrated development effort, we completed and successfully deployed Seesaw v2 as a replacement for both existing platforms,” writes Sing. “Overall it allowed us to increase service availability and reduce management overhead.” It’s worth noting that while this project comes out of Google, the open-source version is not an official Google product. So don’t expect the company to provide any official support.
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IBM Closes Weather Co. Purchase, Names David Kenny New Head Of Watson Platform
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Ingrid Lunden
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IBM is taking another step to expand its Watson AI business and build its presence in areas like IoT: today the company announced that its of the Weather Company — the giant weather media and data group — has now officially closed. IBM is not disclosing the value of the deal: it was originally reported to be in the region of , but sources close to IBM tell us this was inaccurate. (For context, the Weather Company was previously acquired in 2008 for $3.5 billion by a consortium that included Bain, Blackstone and NBC Universal.) As part of the deal, IBM is making some changes: First, the Weather Company’s cloud platform will now run on IBM’s Cloud data centers (recall that it once was a ). That platform will now power of IBM’s wider push into data services and Watson’s Internet of Things business. This will bring a massively bigger amount of data into the mix, covering what IBM describes as billions of IoT sensors. IBM will also use its weight to scale the Weather Company’s business: the company plans to expand weather.com into five more markets including China, India and Brazil “immediately”, as well as integrate it into IBM’s 45 global cloud centers. IBM is also making an executive change: David Kenny, who had been the CEO of the Weather Company, will take on a newly-created role at IBM running the company’s wider Watson platform business. The IBM acquisition will include most — but not all — of the Weather Company’s assets: its B2B, mobile and cloud properties; weather.com; Weather Underground; The Weather Company brand; and WSI, which houses all the company’s data science and enterprise services will all fold into Big Blue. The Weather Channel — perhaps the Weather Company’s most mainstream product — is not included. But as part of the sale, under a long-term contract, it will license weather data forecasts and analytics now owned by IBM. IBM and the Weather Company had — IBM cut a deal in 2015 to tap into the Weather Company’s network of 100,000 weather sensors to ingest data for its machine-learning-based analytics services. The acquisition will now give IBM ownership of the company’s tech, and help it deliver more services around the weather vertical to current and existing IBM customers. IBM also plans to build on the platform created by the Weather Company, expanding it to include other datasets. “I think the weather platform is not just about weather data,” Kenny said in an interview today. “Obviously we ingest more weather data than others and process it in the cloud for pilots, insurers or farmers or ordinary citizens to make better informed decisions. But that platform can be reused for other unstructured data sets… this will be helpful for IBM in other business areas. What we have figured out at the Weather Company, and IBM will continue to explore across more IoT applications, is how to take data from lots of places and turn that into decisions to help make things work.” One example he cited was in the area of connected cars — an area where we have heard IBM is looking to do more business down the road. The same platform that might take in weather data can now also ingest data around other automotive details around speed, or mileage, or tire pressure and other diagnostics or wider traffic conditions, to feed back information to the car companies for future products, or to the drivers or cars themselves to drive better. The Weather Company’s cloud data platform already had a track record before coming to IBM: it powers the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the U.S., IBM points out, and it handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services daily. And while Internet of Things applications like this may be an obvious endpoint, they are not the only area that Kenny as the new platform head will oversee, or where Weather Company data will be used. Kenny said that there are already at least 500 companies using Watson-based machine learning data, spanning applications in areas like healthcare, travel and retail services. The idea will be to create more intelligent analytics for these groups leveraging the Weather Co. datasets. (The proverbial made into an IT service, so to speak.) IBM more generally has making a big push to bring the company into the next generation of computing. In part, this is to help offset declines in more legacy IT services businesses. Its Global Technology Services and Global Business Services, as well as its software division, all declined in , while cloud, mobile and analytics services all grew. These newer areas are still much smaller than the legacy business, however, and IBM has seen 15 straight quarters of revenue decline. So it’s a slow, ongoing process of transformation, as CEO Ginny Rometty might say. Kenny is not ruling out more acquisitions down the line. “My goal is to make Watson a robust platform and a leader in cognitive computing. Where there are places where you can go faster of course we will look at acquisitions but I would say this is about building a platform, it’s not a roll up or anything like that.” Other execs on the Watson team include Harriet Green, head of Watson IoT, Education and Commerce, and Deborah DiSanzo, who leads Watson Health. Michael Rhodin, who launched the Watson business and drove the formation of Watson Health and Watson IoT, will now lead Watson business development where he’ll identify the next Watson verticals and “related acquisition strategy.” The Weather Company, meanwhile, will be led by Cameron Clayton, who was most recently its president, product and technology.
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Apple Acquires Flyby Media, Makers Of Tech That “Sees” The World Around You
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Sarah Perez
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Apple’s VR ambitions continue. According to a new report from the , Apple has acquired an augmented reality startup called , which developed technology that allows mobile phones to “see” the world around them. The company, notably, had worked with Google in the past, as it was the first consumer-facing application to use the image-recognition capabilities found in Google’s “Project Tango.” In addition, Flyby Media was the vision-based software partner for “Project Tango.” It then used that same IP to develop an app designed for broader consumer use. let mobile “scan” objects in the real world – like a hat, sign, poster, building, etc. – then save that item to a collection of shared objects. Friends could then send messages to those objects as a way of communicating. It was very much an “internet of things” type of application. But while the consumer-facing app may have sounded a little gimmicky, the underlying technology is likely what drew Apple’s interest. Its big technical trick, after all, was its ability to “see” and understand the world outside the camera lens. Flyby Media was founded by Cole Van Nice and Oriel Bergig in 2010, and was joined by CEO Mihir Shah, previously CEO at Tapjoy, at a later date. The company had offices in both New York and Palo Alto, and had raised $13.78 million in outside investment from Chart Ventures Partners and CNF Investments, . Though the Flyby Media website is now down, the company had once itself as being “dedicated to building new technology that can elevate, rather than replace, our real-world experiences.” Specifically, it said it was developing the next-generation of consumer mobile-social applications that connect the physical world with digital content, and links “real life” to mobile and wearable devices. The team had capabilities in the areas of large-scale SLAM, indoor navigation, sensor fusion, image recognition and 3D tracking. [gallery ids="1270132,1270147,1270131"] Apple has been interested in VR for several years, the FT notes in its report. Under Steve Jobs, the company experimented with VR headsets by building prototypes and it filed several patents before deciding the technology was immature. But now it seems to be diving back in, amid increased competition in the space from the likes of Samsung with Gear VR, Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Magic Leap, as well as significant efforts from Google and Microsoft. The FT reports, too, that Apple has been building prototypes of possible headset configurations for several months now. The acquisition comes shortly after news of Doug Bowman, the lead author of a book on the technology called “3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice.” Bowman joins Apple following a sabbatical from his position as a professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Apple confirmed the Flyby Media acquisition the way it usually does, by offering a simple statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” This is not Apple’s first acquisition in the area of augmented reality. The , as well as It also bought a motion-sensing company Word has it that Apple is actively building out a VR team, though it’s not yet clear to what end. That is, the technology could be used to build a competing headset to something like Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR. Apple could be developing technology that would eventually make it to the iPhone, similar to something like Google’s Project Tango, which brings computer vision to mobile devices. Or it could be developing something else entirely that has yet to be unveiled.
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Custom Apparel Shop Teespring Lays Off Staff, Exits Providence
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Sarah Perez
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Following , custom T-shirt shop has laid off under 10 percent of its workforce and is shutting down its Providence office entirely. The company had around 300 total employees ahead of the layoffs, but not all those who work in Providence are out of a job, we understand. Instead, some have been offered the opportunity to relocate to Teespring’s San Francisco headquarters, its newer Seattle office, or its manufacturing site in Kentucky. A few more may be remaining in Providence, but will no longer work from the shuttered office. Teespring’s staff was informed about the office’s closure a few weeks ago by way of an internal announcement. Based on reports and comments from sources familiar with the matter, Teespring may have had a staff of 122 in Providence before last summer’s restructuring, which was then reduced to 52 around June 2015. Now its Providence headcount is nearing zero. by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and others, Y Combinator grad Teespring had helped put Providence’s startup community on the map. But anecdotally, at least, we’ve heard that the company hadn’t been very active in the community for some time, and in turn, had somewhat fallen out of the limelight locally, as well. From what we’ve been told, the exit from Rhode Island is not about the expense of doing business in the town that gave birth to the startup thanks to efforts from Brown University grads Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton. Instead, it’s about giving the company the ability to operate more efficiently. The company wants to focus its resources around three key areas: engineering, marketing, manufacturing – represented by the teams in San Francisco, Seattle, and Kentucky, Teespring told us when confirming the news. “Teespring is planning to close its Providence, R.I. office. This is the last phase of our consolidation that started last June, as we complete the co-location of teams in San Francisco, Kentucky, and our new Seattle office,” a spokesperson said. “It’s also part of our effort to aggressively grow investments in engineering, marketing, and manufacturing which are located across those offices,” they added.
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Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Old World and the States, even now, have but little faith in California. They regard this country and everything relating to it as one grand bubble, liable to burst at any moment…. This is how it should be. The wealth of California is thereby passing into the hands of young, active, enterprising men, who in an older country and with these same old capitalists as competitors might have worked to the end of their days, and realized but a mere pittance.” — “It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.” — In my mid-20s at the very bottom of the last economic cycle, I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009. Several months earlier, I had gone into work in at 6 a.m. in London’s banking district to write about global debt and short-term money markets when an in U.S. history. It was a moment of financial paralysis unlike any other in recent American economic memory. A month later in Silicon Valley, the legendary venture capital firm, , warning founders throughout the industry to clamp down on spending or face imminent failure. When I returned home, you could get a room for $800 on Dolores Street. After living in New York City and London, it was the cheapest housing I had ever found. At that time, the region’s technology industry was still somewhat chastened by the dot-com bust less than a decade before, and it wasn’t as hard to hunt for vestiges of a cyberpunk or freak culture that I remember from the mid-1990s as a teenager. I was hopeful about it. Young people were flocking into San Francisco from all over the country and world, and it was still inexpensive enough that you could experiment and explore. But as we all know, less than five years later, everything changed. Silicon Valley’s center of gravity moved north from Palo Alto to SOMA. There was , and then the actual protests themselves. Every day, I get messages. A protest at , whose house had been sold by his bank after the foreclosure crisis. A white female entrepreneur expressing guilt about buying a home in the Bayview District, because it was the only place in the city that was affordable to her. One of the iconic Mission muralist non-profits looking to they’re housed in, lest it gets sold to an owner that will presumably evict them. A handful of . Friends who are social workers, and then even highly-paid lawyers or doctors moving out of the region because they can’t see a long-term future here. It’s just constant. When the iconic Californian writer Joan Didion left New York for Los Angeles after the age of 28, , “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” Almost one hundred fifty years ago in 1858, on ship crossing South America’s Cape Horn from Philadelphia. After staying with a cousin, this young man, Henry George, would eventually take up residence in the Mission District. It was a few years after the Gold Rush had ended, but just the beginning of a new railroad boom. An indecisive, young man, George tried his hand at being a printer, a farm laborer and a weigher at a rice mill, according to historian ” (I crib lots of details from O’Donnell’s work in this piece, so if you like it, ). George eventually settled into printing and typesetting, although stable employment was always a remote reality for him. By 1865, his floundering printing business had brought him to the brink of starvation. With an eight-month pregnant wife who had pawned everything but her wedding ring, the situation became hopeless. On the day that she gave birth, “I stopped a man — a stranger — and told him I wanted $5. He asked what I wanted it for. I told him that my wife was confined and that I had nothing to give her to eat. He gave me the money. If he had not, I think I was desperate enough to have killed him. That deeply personal experience with poverty left a mark on George for the rest of his life. He would always remember what this feeling of absolute want was like. Over the years, he became vocal as an editor on issues of the day like the construction of the railroads. The year before Leland Stanford drove the into the railroads connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans at , George wrote an essay on the promises and drawbacks of the new transportation technology. On the one hand, he saw : Is it too much to say that this city of ours must become the first city of the continent; and is it too much to say that the first city of the continent must ultimately be the first city of the world? And when we remember the irresistible tendency of modern times to concentration — remember that New York, Paris and London are still growing faster than ever — where shall we set bounds to the future population and wealth of San Francisco; where find a parallel for the city which a century hence will surround this bay? And yet, on the other, George saw that the railroad’s benefits would only advantage a few. Stanford and the other members of Central Pacific’s Big Four, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, initially had problems constructing the railroad profitably. After . But once they turned to inexpensive Chinese-American laborers, , they were able to blast through technically difficult passes . It was somewhat ironic, given that just a few years earlier, Stanford had called as California governor and urged limits on immigration from the continent. Stanford later changed his mind, and wrote to U.S. President Andrew Johnson that without the Chinese, the Transcontinental Railroad would not have been possible, and that they were Transportation and communications technologies like the railroads and the telegraph would truly integrate the U.S. economy from coast-to-coast for the first time, and George noted that while these new industrialists and land owners would benefit, “Those who have lands, mines, established businesses, special abilities of certain kinds, will become richer for it and find increased opportunities; those who have only their own labor will become poorer, and find it harder to get ahead — first, because it will take more capital to buy land or to get into business; and second, because as competition reduces the wages of labor, this capital will be harder for them to obtain.” This issue of land, and land engrossment, would become one of the most heated issues of the period. Large-scale farming operations and industrial cattle ranchers like Miller & Lux to . By early 1870s, a . One afternoon around that time, George about the value of the nearby land. The teamster had no idea, but replied that another owner was selling land at $1,000 an acre. “Like a flash it came upon me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay for the privilege. I turned back amidst quiet thought, to the perception that then came to me and has been with me ever since.” Land would become George’s defining issue. His argument was that . Speculators would increase the price of land faster than wealth could be created to pay for it, leaving less left over for labor to earn as wages. The land and housing boom would finally become so unsustainable, that it would lead to a collapse of enterprises at the margin, prompting a recession or depression with widespread unemployment. Those with the right to it were “elevated,” while those without it, were “crushed down.” The wedge is obvious today. , even with the Facebook and Twitter IPOs and private tech boom. The main transfer mechanism is land and housing costs, as rising rents and evictions push service and other low-wage workers to the brink. George’s solution . If an owner wanted to develop their property to make it more useful or productive, George argued that they should have the right to keep the value from those efforts. But increases in the value of underlying land were created by — and ultimately belonged to — the public at large. Because no one could create land, it would be impossible to tax it out of existence. In contrast, property taxes disincentivize people from using land more productively, since re-developing land leads to higher re-assessments. A century later, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz would prove out a Henry George theorem, showing that in certain cases . This suggests that land taxes alone could be enough to sustain public or government expenditures. Milton Friedman would call them the “least bad tax,” while Karl Marx George would publish these ideas in his seminal work “Progress and Poverty,” which would go on to sell several million copies and kick off the Progressive Era. “Progress and Poverty” captured the zeitgeist of the times. The parallels between about a speculative land deal gone awry, and the modern era are striking. In the 1870s, . But by 1892, the New York Tribune counted 4,047, and by 1916, there were more than 40,000. At least two, But that prosperity was not equally shared. , as the country’s manufacturing workers . Cities like New York City and Chicago saw their populations explode, as the country’s urban share of the population rocketed A would put 54,000 businesses, 5,000 banks and half the country’s railroads out of business, with unemployment skyrocketing to 30 percent. Because there were no body of tenants’ rights laws at the time, evictions in Gilded Age New York The Ubers of the day, New York’s streetcar corporations, . During a mid-1880s national campaign for an eight-hour workday, streetcar drivers and conductors worked between fourteen and sixteen hours per day, usually without breaks, and standing the entire time on platforms exposed to all of the elements, whether in the searing heat or biting cold. The streetcar companies routinely deducted “fines” from their drivers’ pay for minor offenses, not unlike the way that ride-hailing networks have routinely reduced their drivers’ take home pay per ride regularly over the last few years. Just a few decades after the urban elite of cities like New York , like the one in San Francisco’s Mission District that’s currently used to film kink and sado-masochistic pornography or the one in New York used annually for the high-end contemporary art fair, The Armory Show, to protect their assets and property in the event of labor riots. Into this period of enormous technological and economic change and societal stress, George’s book, “Progress and Poverty,” shot him into the public consciousness. but ultimately losing to a Tammany Hall candidate. Four days before his next run at mayor of New York City, George died of a stroke. His idea for a land tax was never implemented, but the Progressive Era he kickstarted fundamentally changed the nature and shape of the U.S. government. Around the time that George published “Progress and Poverty,” the U.S. had the smallish sort of government that modern-day libertarians would favor. It took in , and most true governance happened at the local and state levels. There was no Federal Reserve Bank, the economy ran on the gold standard and military was small with only commitments to guarding the frontier. It was also deeply corrupt and patrimonial with private interests coursing through it using bribes and patronage. But by the turn of the century, , according to . Technological and economic changes had fundamentally altered the structure of society, creating demand for a new form of political governance. This is part of the argument , whose work is sometimes cited , or She mapped out five technological revolutions across more than 200 years from the Industrial Revolution started in Northern England all the way through the beginnings of Silicon Valley in 1970s. The most often-quoted part of her work focuses on how technology is adopted on an S-curve, with multiple phases. First, there is an installation phase with enormous, unstable speculative energy and then a crash. After the crash, comes a turning point. Only then, can a broad-based deployment phase occur where a technology’s true effects on society are felt. This is the so-called Golden Age where the real money is made. The interpretation in Silicon Valley is usually that the 2000 to 2001 dot-com bust was the turning point, and that we’re now in the “Golden Age” for deployment of Internet-based technologies and businesses. But Perez feels that Silicon Valley investors are misinterpreting her work. In some lengthy e-mail correspondence I had with her last year, she argued that we were not in a Golden Age yet. She said we’re still at a turning point, and that the 2001 and 2008 crashes were a sort of double bubble. “We are still in the turning point because finance continues to be decoupled from production,” she wrote me. “They are playing with derivatives and other synthetic instruments that are the equivalent of bets in Las Vegas. And they are still making money with them. The only ones that are really investing in innovation are the new giants of the ICT world, they are excited with their power and they feel like it’s deployment. It’s the shining bit of a very dark world, marked by inequality and hopelessness. When a golden age arrives, everybody knows it. You can feel prosperity reaching more and more people; there is hope for everyone, not just the successful few at the top.” A missing piece of Perez’s work, that often goes underemphasized by the private investment community, is the role of government in creating an equitable framework that allows everyone to participate in benefits of technological change. This is not an argument in favor of big government for big government’s sake; it’s to point out that when technology changes the complexity or structure of society, citizens have to push public institutions to transform themselves too. “Golden ages are not brought by markets alone,” Perez told me. “Historically, they have never done it.” If Perez is right, the polarization and disillusionment obvious in the 2016 presidential primaries through the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is just the beginning of something else. Broad institutional and governmental change is what the Gilded Age triggered in the ensuing Progressive Era. George’s ideas would echo for many decades and influenced an entire generation of leaders from Leo Tolstoy to Sun Yat Sen to George Bernard Shaw. Even in California, his ideas lingered. Former San Francisco mayor and before conservative homeowners voted in Proposition 13’s property tax caps. It’s funny because several hard-core SF progressives and even for-profit real estate developers in the city, have told me they’re fans of Georgist policies. (This is even though I have on occasion seen these exact same people in screaming matches with each other.) So why was the land tax never implemented? I would like to think that an even newer technology rendered George’s ideas obsolete — at least temporarily. Created about a decade after George’s death and paired with an unprecedented level of government infrastructural subsidy to support adoption, this technology unlocked a much bigger supply of inexpensive, greenfield land for development, enabled the formation of a broad-based, property-owning democracy and undercut the concentrated power of the urban land-owning class from the 19th century Gilded Age. What was it? The automobile.
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Spotify’s Video Content Hits iOS A Bit Earlier Than Expected
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Sarah Perez
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Spotify’s foray into video has gone live on iOS a little earlier than expected. On Monday, that Spotify had begun to roll out its video product to all users, beginning with its Android app this week. The iOS launch of the new “Shows” section, however, was not expected until “the next week or so,” a spokesperson told us at the time. While that may be true – after all, most can’t yet see the “Shows” option in the “Browse” area on Spotify – there is a way to get in through the back door, so to speak. But first, in case you missed it: Spotify , saying that it would introduce video clip, podcasts, news and more to its product. The actual roll out of the video content ended up being delayed until this month, though. The company told The WSJ that it had been testing video with less than 10 percent of its users in four markets (U.S., U.K., Germany, and Sweden) in the months since the announcement. Spotify’s VP of Product, Shiva Rajaraman, brushed off the late launch as being “part of the plan,” according to The WSJ’s report. This week, the launch finally began as “Shows” went live on Android. Accessed from within “Browse,” Android users can now watch videos from providers including ESPN, Comedy Central, the BBC, VICE Media, Maker Studios, MTV,, TED, NBC, ABC News, Vogue, Elite Daily, Tastemade, Wired, Fusion, and others. Content will be varied by market, notes Spotify, and can be tailored to users’ individual tastes. As with artists, users can choose to “Follow” shows on Spotify from the show’s page. These are then accessible for easy access in the future from the “Your Library” section on Spotify. And that leads us to the back door. Though the option to “browse” straight to the video section doesn’t yet seem to be broadly rolled out on iOS, you can reach the still-hidden “Shows” page from “Your Library.” After navigating to your library, you should see the new “Shows” option under “Playlists,” “Stations,” “Songs,” “Albums,” and “Artists.” Tap this link and you’ll be taken to an empty page which will later list all the shows you follow on the service. Here, Spotify says “ .” You then tap on the big “Shows” button below and – – the Shows page appears. This page offers a selection of featured shows and videos, a way to browse video and audio shows, and it lets you dive into the various shows by genre – like Lifestyle, Tech & Gaming, Society & Culture, News, Comedy, Entertainment, Sports & Recreation, and much more. Nothing seems to be broken here, even though the section is still hidden in “Browse.” The videos play; you can follow shows, add items to your queue, and so on. Expanding to video is a notable step for the streaming music service, which is valued at over $8.5 billion, and is . The company claims 20 million paying subscribers, though recent leaks peg that number as being even higher – from the Swedish newspaper that broke the funding news. Today, video and music are overlapping more than ever on mobile devices, with YouTube trying to spin off its large collection of music videos into its own, paid service YouTube Music, for example. Meanwhile, consumers are watching more video content than ever on their mobile devices. [gallery ids="1270101,1270100,1270099,1270096,1270095"] Outside of the leaders in the space – Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and Hulu – there are dozens of niche offerings popping up, ranging from over-the-top premium cable TV, like HBO and Showtime, to startup challengers like Vessel or Pluto TV, and like Sling TV (Dish), Watchable (Comcast), Stream (Comcast), or go90 (Verizon: disclosure, TechCrunch parent.) All hope to carve out a niche of their own in the mobile video market. It makes sense that Spotify, which has already established a significant presence on users’ mobile devices as a top 10 to 15 ranked app, would expand into video. In addition to potentially increasing user engagement with its application and convert more free users to subscribers, the move also paves the way for the company to generate new revenue streams in the future by going beyond the music industry’s slim margins and reaching into video.
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Free, Ad-Supported iTunes Radio Is No More
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Sarah Perez
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Ad-supported iTunes Radio stations have today gone off the air. As we , Apple decided it would shutter its free streaming iTunes Radio offering, a competitor to Pandora, in an effort to boost subscriptions to its paid service, Apple Music. Going forward, the only free radio option is Apple’s Beats 1 radio – the DJ-hosted station, which Apple is now as its “premier free broadcast.” For those who had yet to pay for Apple Music, that means you’ll lose access to dozens of curated radio stations focused on various musical genres, and more – including the newly released and certainly entertaining . To continue to listen to these stations, as well as take advantage of the on-demand music streaming option, listeners will need to convert to paid subscribers of Apple Music. That service costs $9.99 per month for an individual account, or $14.99 for a family subscription (up to 6 people). Apple’s initial foray into the on-demand streaming space has been doing fairly well – a testament to the broad reach of its platform. The company said earlier in January that it . The figure was up from the it claimed in October. That already puts Apple Music ahead of Pandora, which boasts over 78 million active users, but only 3.9 million paid accounts. And while Apple may be stepping away from the ad-supported radio model that Pandora embraces, Pandora has been working to make its service a better competitor to Apple Music. that introduces personalized recommendations, similar to Apple Music’s “For You” section. However, Spotify is still the one to beat in the space, with over 20 million paid members. We should note, however, that the curated iTunes Radio stations may no longer be free, but the “internet radio” section in iTunes – a deprecated offering that most have forgotten about – remains live.
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The State of Digital In Iran
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Amir Bozorgzadeh
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I don’t think anyone really understands the depth of digital upheaval Iran has experienced in the past few years. Social media and e-commerce consumption have both gone topsy-turvy in parallel to an overwhelming migration to smartphone devices. It was October 2012 when I first conducted an to share how Iranians consumed digital in its varied forms. I’ve rerun the same study this month through our channel on LINE, sampling 886 respondents between January 17-19. It’s noteworthy to mention that 62 percent of the participants accessed the survey while using a VPN. Nearly two-thirds ( ) of Iranians , even though it was blocked (and still is). It has dropped 23 points since, settling down to 35 percent, or roughly one-third. The relatively new kid on the block, Instagram, has replaced Facebook as the market leader (although the latter technically owns the former), reigning in as the social platform of choice with half of Iranians actively using it. Google+ has remained comparatively stable throughout the years, only dropping by 5 points to 31 percent. Twitter, blocked then as it is blocked now, dropped from 12 to 7 percent, while Linkedin has slipped by half down to 6 percent. , the local social media network that was only popular due to its strange immunity to censorship, has become practically obsolete, dropping from 14 to 3 percent. Source: Jeremy Ellsworth / Consumption levels of social media have completely changed gears in the country. Twenty-nine percent used to spend at least 1 hour a day idling away through myriad postings. That figure has now skyrocketed to 62 percent, of which 22 percent spend more than three hours a day on social media. Posting photos at least once or twice a day has multiplied threefold, from 7 to 25 percent. Blog and forum activity has remained fairly constant, hovering around the double-digit mark. Only 12 percent use video calls on a daily basis, which is a 5 percent upward shift, but this reflects the stagnant state of sluggish and expensive bandwidth and data packages that continue to restrict the population from utilizing this service. Source: Jeremy Ellsworth / Instant messaging has taken the country by storm, just as it has the rest of the world. Thirty-eight percent are using instant messengers like Telegram and LINE several times a day, compared to 12 percent back in 2012 when 3G had yet to be fully released across the telecom sector. Smartphone activity in general has spiked across the board for everything except checking emails (55 percent versus 40 percent in 2012), which has grown modestly through the years compared to other activities. Iranians are using their mobile device daily for instant chat (60 percent), downloading apps (60 percent), reading the news (60 percent), watching video clips (59 percent), playing games (54 percent) and streaming music (45 percent). Source: Jeremy Ellsworth / E-commerce has likewise exploded as local entrepreneurs copied and pasted proven global models that were well received. Iranians are literally shopping online by a factor of 3-5 times compared to 2012 levels. Every option under the sun has leaped onto unparalleled horizons that hallmark the fact that Iranians are true believers of the ethos of digital spending. Forty-eight percent are buying airline tickets online at least once a year, versus 17 percent in 2012. Hotel bookings have jumped from 9 to 42 percent. Thanks to e-commerce upstarts like Digikala, purchasing tangible products online like electronics (44 percent), clothing (49 percent) and even mundane items like spare car parts (41 percent) and insurance (40 percent) are no longer hindered by consumer misgivings about whether the digital channel is secure, reliable and can deliver the same quality experience as shopping offline. Source: Jeremy Ellsworth / The demographics of the survey consisted of a fairly balanced mix. The gender split leans male (77 percent) with a good proportion of females (23 percent). Thirty-nine percent are 25 to 34 years old, followed by 18 to 24 (28 percent) and 35 to 44 (16 percent). Singles or those who have never married account for half (52 percent) the sample, while 39 percent are married. Thirty-one percent have diplomas, 31 percent have bachelor degrees and 9 percent have master degrees. One-third are employed, 16 percent are students and a startling 26 percent indicate that they are currently without work. Forty-three percent currently make a household income of less than 1 million toman (approximately US$333) per month, 24 percent of the remaining households make 1-2 million toman and 8 percent make 2-5 million toman per month.
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Twitter’s Jeff Seibert On Startup Lessons Learned From Being Bought By Unicorns Like Twitter And Box
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Harry Stebbings
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Last week I had the chance to speak with Jeff Seibert, Senior Director of Product at Twitter and Co-Founder of Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter for $259m) and one of the main individuals leading the new guard at Twitter. In what turned out to be a reflective interview we discussed a range of topics including what it was like raising VC money in 2009, why being overly transparent with your team can be a hindrance and why Jeff decided selling Crashlytics to Twitter was the best option, allowing them to be deployed on over 1 billion devices. Seibert also discussed the need for startups to negotiate for continued investment in their product by their acquirer in acquisition talks; at what stage runway startups should look to go and raise again; what life is like at Twitter following the acquisition of Crashlytics — and the next 5 years for him and the Twitter product?
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Cronofy, The Calendar API Helping Businesses Keep Customer And Staff Diaries In Sync, Scores $1.6M
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Steve O'Hear
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, the U.K. startup that offers a calendar API to help businesses and their customers synchronise calendars, has raised a $1.6 million seed round led by Firestartr alongside Amsterdam-based venture capital firm henQ. The investment comes post-pivot after the company dropped its rather convoluted consumer offering, called , to focus purely on its then fledgling B2B model. “We’re the plumbing that connects apps and services with peoples calendars,” explains Cronofy founder Adam Bird. “Our customers are SaaS providers”. Cronofy’s ‘single calendar API’ lets developers quickly integrate their apps with customers’ calendars, functionality Bird likens to what Twilio has done for messaging and Stripe for payment. In similar fashion, Cronofy handles the heavy lifting required to deal with the “plumbing and technical synchronisation issues” inherent when integrating with multiple calendar services and, most crucially, keeping those calendars in sync. Customers cited by the startup include flight search engine Skyscanner, which is using the Cronofy API as part of its new TravelPro service which sees a customer’s itinerary pushed automatically to their calendar and kept up to date with any flight changes. Another example is Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) providers who are using Cronofy to streamline the interview booking process, co-ordinating the relevant staff members’ calendars and the applicant’s. “Importantly this can be kept up to date as people’s availability changes and the moment the candidate chooses a slot, it’s in everyone’s calendars,” explains Bird. In addition, the so-called ‘gig economy’ is also finding a use in Cronofy’s service. For example, Zesty is using the API to get access to real-time availability for their physiotherapists, osteopaths etc. so when a user books online they can be confident that the professional is available. “The moment a booking is made they use us to push it straight to the professional’s calendar. Real time sync is critical to a great user experience,” he says. To that end, Richard Muirhead, co-founder and chairman of Firestartr, says in a statement: “Synchronising schedules has become critical for many millions more people, driven by smart phones, the gig economy and crazy calendars. Software developers crave easy ways to embed great functionality into their apps and websites, so we really like Cronofy’s developer-driven route to market.”
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Snoop Dogg On Why He’s Investing in GameOn
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Katie Roof
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Snoop told TechCrunch that he’s investing in the app because he “loves sports” and he thinks it’s a good way to chat about the games. “Fans from all over the world can join me and talk about their favorite teams, best plays, and of course a bunch of trash talk,” said Snoop. A big Steelers fan, Snoop has already been conducting regular group chats on the app during the games. When it comes to his latest investment, Snoop says, “I love Sports, especially football so teaming up with GameOn was only natural.” Fo shizzle.
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A Global Perspective Of Israeli Tech In 2015
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Shelly Hod Moyal
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From the Chinese stock market crash that shook global equity markets to the obsession with hunting for unicorns, 2015 was a year filled with volatility and non-traditional capital flowing into the private markets. Israel felt the effects of these global trends, with an unprecedented $5 billion in investments, $8 billion M&A activity and a significant drop in IPOs (to $4 billion). Yet beneath the surface of these high-level statistics lies a wealth of interesting data. Whether it’s sectors like cyber and fintech heating up or syndications and co-investments leading to increased round sizes and valuations, shares much in common with the global technology ecosystem. Sony’s security breach last accelerated the worldwide realization that, as the TV series Homeland puts it, “The soldiers are hackers, the battlefield is online.” Israel’s edge in security, fueled by the IDF’s elite 8200 unit and headlined by Microsoft’s acquisition of three-year-old Adallom had investors contribute $520 million to Israeli cyber in 2015. The realization that Israeli cyber companies can successfully IPO (CyberArk in 2014) or quickly exit for large sums has caused the appetite for Israel cyber to skyrocket this year. The in financial services revenue at risk for technological disruption was a prime target in 2015. Startups around the globe raised $11 billion in venture capital in the first three quarters, up from $6 billion through the same period in 2014. Israeli fintech exits grew to $1.3 billion in 2015, up from $700 million in 2014. Meanwhile, marketplace lender Prosper established an R&D center with its acquisition of Billguard, launched an accelerator to tap into Israel’s talent pool and cash flow optimizer Fundbox raised . Global adtech experienced a significant correction in H2, despite IronSource’s $150 million merger and Taboola’s $117 million Series E in H1. Highlighted by Fidelity’s of Taboola from $1 billion to $500 million, fraud cleanup and and recent layoffs, investors are requiring ad networks to reinvent themselves and find meaningful points of differentiation and sustainable business models. This shifting mentality amongst VCs caused a significant drop-off in Israel’s adtech fundraising efforts, from $260 million in H1 to $52 million in H2. A majority of the 61 U.S. unicorns that emerged in 2015 were B2C plays. Once a taboo for investors in Israel, success stories like Google’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Waze, Wix’s IPO and Rakuten’s $900 million acquisition of Viber have buoyed investor confidence in Israel’s ability to build consumer-facing unicorns. This year’s Israeli B2C investments were highlighted by $60 million round, raising $50 million and landing a $13 million seed round, challenging the notion that these kinds of rounds are only possible in Silicon Valley. Much like the Israeli cyber and fintech sectors, which benefited from significant global attention in 2015, enterprise software and medtech (including life sciences, biotechnology and medical devices) continued to flourish as the backbone of Israeli high-tech. Together, they contributed to around half of Israel’s total fundraising and exit activity. After a hot start in the first half of 2015, China’s market crash in June caused widespread market volatility, resulting in the lowest number of tech IPOs since . Israeli IPOs suffered in parallel, with only $4 billion in IPO activity this year (down from $10 billion in 2014). Private markets, on the other hand, told a far different story. Aligned with the in global tech M&A, dwarfing the previous record of $412 billion set in 2000, Israeli tech M&A surged to a record $8 billion in 2015, up from $5 billion in 2014. With 61 private companies surpassing $1 billion valuations, the global trend to “stay private longer” was fueled by a plethora of hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity funds, corporations and private individuals. This trend impacted Israel too, as average time to exit increased from six to seven years in 2015, and late-stage investments in Israel grew from $1.3 billion in 2014 to $2.2 billion in 2015. Furthermore, late-stage funds raised $689 million, more than triple the $214 million in 2014. Watching Uber’s valuation grow 20x in 20 months while the Barclay Hedge Fund Index reported a measly YTD return frustrated institutional money managers. Rather than analyzing and investing solely in publicly traded companies, a swath of new institutional money managers invested alongside VC and PE funds both globally and in Israel in 2015. By getting in earlier, these funds can share in the value created pre-IPO and enjoy some of the wealth created in the venture capital industry. Much like institutional investors, individuals frustrated by low interest rates and poor public market performance looked to new financial instruments like P2P lending and equity crowdfunding to diversify their portfolios and seek higher returns. With equity crowdfunding platforms supplying access to highly coveted Israeli startups, participation from private investors continued to grow. Furthermore, public adoption of these platforms enabled VCs and angels to syndicate more deals with private individuals through the Internet, creating additional capital for companies seeking private funding. Corporations continued to show heightened interest in technology startups with a growing need to stay relevant and innovative. To this end, 17 Israeli accelerators were established in 2015, with Barclays, GE, Intel, Cisco and Samsung amongst the prominent foreign corporations that realized an Israeli accelerator is a necessity to stay globally competitive. With a total of 80 accelerators launched in the past four years, Israeli startups’ connectivity to the global business community is initiated at the earliest stages of formation. The influx of cash from institutions, corporations and private individuals has impacted the Israeli startup ecosystem in four main ways. First, the flow of capital from non-traditional sources endowed entrepreneurs with more options, negotiating leverage and thus, better terms. These factors shortened the fundraising horizon for Israeli startups, allowing them to spend less time worrying about money and more time building their businesses. Second, the record investment in Israeli high-tech created a significant number of new jobs, and intensified the competition for senior developers, product managers and data scientists. Startups will need to think creatively to attract and retain Israel’s best and brightest. Third, average round size grew 34 percent, to $6.3 million. 2015 saw a record number of syndications, and co-investing became commonplace. Many VCs, angels and equity crowdfunding platforms that had often competed for deals chose to collaborate. The fourth and final consequence, higher valuations, cannot be separated from the astounding 61 new unicorns worldwide. The meteoric rise in late-stage valuations globally has affected the venture capital industry and investors throughout the company life cycle. In light of both increasing demand for technology investments and bullish financial projections, prices rose across the board. Average in Silicon Valley ($5.1 million), New York ($4.5 million), Europe ($3.2 million) and Israel ($2.7 million) are at their highest levels since the dot-com boom. These effects have led many to wonder: Is this a bubble? We may very well be at the peak of the business cycle, but it doesn’t mean we are heading toward a big bust. In the past few years, we’ve hit a critical mass of smartphone adoption, affordable Internet access at scale, reliable cloud computing infrastructure and the democratization of data. These secular trends, combined with the era of open-sourced code and APIs, have enabled entrepreneurs in every industry — materials, telecommunications, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, finance, consumer products, energy, industrials and utilities — to reimagine how businesses can and should operate. Certain sectors like adtech already experienced a significant correction this year, and others may follow. Public markets may have a rocky year, and many unicorns , sold for hundreds of millions, not billions. But that doesn’t mean we should expect a meltdown in 2016. In the aggregate, we remain cautiously optimistic that 2015 wasn’t a fluke, but rather a new baseline for Startup Nation.
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Ad Blocking: A Primer
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Mani Gandham
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There’s a lot of buzz right now around ad blocking. Depending on your perception, you might consider ad blocking a savior… or a growing problem. Both points of view are valid, to some degree. What appears to be a certainty, however, is that the use of ad blockers is expected to grow exponentially. Ad blocking, in technical terms, is the act of selectively downloading material when visiting a website or using an app, thus “blocking” the unwanted items from loading. Most often this refers to ads, but it can cover anything, like embedded media, social widgets or tracking beacons. Ad blocking involves software that can work at various levels. Commonly called an “ad blocker,” it usually is installed as an extension into a browser like Chrome or Firefox. Once installed, it filters content in two main ways: 1) by checking against a (crowdsourced) blacklist the domain names of items loading on a web page and stopping them from loading, and 2) then checking the page after it is done loading and removing any items that fit certain rules, like images with standard ad dimensions or text within a box that says “sponsored.” Because most sites use third-party JavaScript tags in their code, and these providers use the same domain name with all their clients, the domain blacklist approach is highly effective. The content of the page is downloaded and stripped of ad tags before they even load, let alone render an ad, so ad networks never even know that an impression has occurred. This software also can run at other levels. For example, more sophisticated users can change settings on their operating system so that no ad networks are contacted, no matter which browser or application is used. Others install software on their entire network (on the Internet router for a house or business) so that it works for everyone in that location. Some companies, like even create software to sell directly to mobile carriers to block ads. Carrier-level blocking actually in the U.S., so it’s unlikely to ever be ubiquitous. However, recently there has been a rise in the use of zero-rating — allowing some data to not count against a customer’s bill, e.g., Spotify streaming for T-Mobile — which could potentially be used to make advertisers pay for data and take away some of the bandwidth cost from users. This also has come as another potential violation of net neutrality. There are four main reasons someone would use an ad blocker: performance, privacy, security and a better experience. Because ad blocking is mostly accomplished through browser plug-ins, it makes sense that it only works against ads on websites. Apple’s iOS has recently allowed for content blocking extensions in its Safari browser, so now it’s possible to block ads on mobile websites, as well. Both iOS and Android also allow for third-party browsers that can come with ad-blocking abilities built in. Ads in native mobile and desktop apps are mostly immune as they have no extensions (and can’t be affected by browser plug-ins). Sponsored content that’s embedded directly by the publisher is also unaffected (like messages written naturally within an article or read aloud in a podcast). Some boutique custom pieces like the Netflix-sponsored articles on WSJ.com can be blocked, but are usually left alone because they are good-quality content. First-party ad serving is a gray area and basically refers to the website publisher serving ads from their own domain (the way ads on Facebook’s website load from ). This usually implies that these ads are sourced directly and can get around ad blocking because blocking the domain would block the entire site. Advertisers won’t really be affected much. They still have a massive amount of website traffic available, along with lots of other channels, like social and mobile, to which to shift their spend. As more content is heading toward closed platforms and apps, advertising will only become more integrated and harder to remove. Publishers are the most affected because they lose out on ad revenue when visitors block ads. There are ways around this, such as using first-party ads and producing sponsored content, but that requires a lot of time and effort and only works for top publishers with the reputation and large audience in which advertisers are interested. Mid-size and long-tail publishers can’t do this effectively — they lack the scale and infrastructure to be viable. Some publishers have tried paywalls, but that comes with a steep decline in users willing to pay, and only works for very high-quality, exclusive or niche content. Publishers that tried using messages to ask ad blocking users to whitelist their sites have seen — and actually saw an increase in the ad-blocking rate by alerting users who weren’t using it. There are efforts to improve the experience, like for micropayments and Facebook Instant Articles, but the revenue situation is far from concrete. Nobody knows if it will actually work and be sustainable, but the future is probably a combination of distributed access through closed platforms, different technologies employed by websites and more sponsored content. Ad blocking mostly affects networks that are primarily website-based, but there are plenty of technical solutions to get around ad blocking. Options include continuously changing domain names and server-side ad rendering. Because ad tech is already 95 percent server-side (meaning you contact an ad server and it does a bunch of work to figure out what ad to show and sends it back), the remaining 5 percent that uses a JavaScript tag to render ads on the page can also be moved to the server. This would be a big change, and likely would need a standardized API in order for publishing systems to work with ad networks to seamlessly render content and ads in a single pass. Content-delivery networks can also potentially do this by automatically rewriting the page to include ads with the content as it’s loaded. Analytics are also something not mentioned much, but are just as affected. Services like Google Analytics, Chartbeat, MixPanel and dozens of other companies that don’t serve ads but help site owners analyze what their audiences are doing are starting to see their stats become useless as a large and important part of the audience is now invisible. They will likely have to move to server-side as well. Advertising won’t be going away anytime soon. Ads are a fundamental part of the web ecosystem and have allowed for the massive growth in content and destinations. They are the reason Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless other services exist. There are only two methods to compensate content producers: pay directly or get free content in exchange for ads. While there is constant innovation in micropayments and subscriptions, the truth is that many people, in countless surveys, have shown they just aren’t willing to pay for the typical content that’s delivered on the web. Articles are worth fractional cents, and there is too much friction with micropayments, especially for content that’s consumed only once. Given all of this, online advertising still remains the fastest, most passive, most anonymous (compared to direct payment methods) and most universally accessible way to subsidize and view content. Ad blocking is definitely growing, though, and for good reasons: But it’s not all doom and gloom; the best part is that this is a completely solvable problem. Advertising is a great model, but what is fundamentally wrong today is the implementation. It’s not advertising itself, but how it’s done that’s causing this current backlash. As the industry evolves, what we’ll likely see is fewer ads (which increases scarcity and actually raises prices and revenue) with more streamlined and non-intrusive units that are focused on content rather than obtrusive in-your-face messages. There will be more focus on privacy and ensuring users feel comfortable with how their data is used. Advertisers will craft more creative pieces that actually entertain and inspire. Banners will still be around, but in-image, rich media and outstream video will need to go. is one of the companies ahead of the curve today with seamlessly delivered native units showcasing quality branded content. Not only does it mean a better user experience, but it also delivers better performance, more engagement and stronger brand awareness for advertisers. Advertising is definitely in a rough spot today. Ad blocking is both good and bad for the industry, but one thing is for sure — it’s a change that has been desperately needed and just might result in a better future for the entire web.
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SpaceX Prepares For Another Rocket Landing On West Coast
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Emily Calandrelli
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Tomorrow at 10:42 AM PST SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Jason-3 satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. For many, it will be what happens after the launch that’s most important. Shortly after liftoff, SpaceX will make another attempt to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, this time on a floating drone ship in the ocean. Back in December, SpaceX successfully landed the Falcon9 first stage on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida. It was considered an important milestone in the space industry and a big step toward making rockets reusable. On Friday, SpaceX performed a static fire test on the recovered engines from that launch. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the data from the test looked good, but that one of the outer engines showed thrust fluctuations, possibly due to debris ingestion. Maybe some debris ingestion. Engine data looks ok. Will borescope tonight. This is one of the outer engines. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) For tomorrow’s launch, SpaceX will attempt a more difficult landing on a drone ship floating in the ocean. Softly landing an unstable rocket is difficult enough without having to navigate it to a small target that can be rocked during ocean turbulence. SpaceX has unsuccessfully tried to its Falcon 9 first stage on a drone ship twice before. The first attempt, made in January of 2015, failed because the booster ran out of hydraulic fluid required to direct its descent. The second attempt, made in April of 2015, was closer but ultimately failed when a control valve stopped responding to commands seconds before touchdown. At a press conference on Friday, SpaceX vice president of mission assurance Hans Koenigsmann was asked why it decided to the landing location. Koenigsmann noted that SpaceX was not given environmental approval to bring the rocket back to land near Vandenberg Air Force Base in time for launch. He said, however, that it was certainly something it would like to do in the future. Sunday will mark the last launch of the company’s Falcon 9 v1.1 generation of boosters. SpaceX now has an upgraded version of the rocket with increased thrust capabilities which was used in the successful December flight from Florida. Koenigsmann emphasized that the decision to land on the drone ship had nothing to do with the capabilities of the Falcon 9 v1.1. He said that it “could absolutely land back on land without any issues. It’s not anything technical in this case.” Unfortunately, live video of the landing attempt is not likely to be provided this time around. Because the landing will be attempted out in the ocean, it will be difficult for SpaceX to maintain a constant internet connection. Of course the primary mission of this flight is not the landing, but a successful launch of the $180 million . A NOAA and NASA project, the Jason-3 is the newest member in a series of Earth-observing satellites designed to provide worldwide observations of global sea levels. Even so, after two failed drone ship rocket landings and one successful land-based recovery under its belt, all eyes will be on SpaceX and its drone ship Sunday morning .
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Jon Russell
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Tech And The Changing Face Of Insurance
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Jennifer Fitzgerald
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It’s only 2016, but the real world is quickly moving into the realm of science fiction. Drones, driverless cars and not-really-hoverboards are (or soon will be) commonplace. We’ve also seen technology change industries not normally associated with the term “cutting edge” — Uber has all but replaced taxis for many people, and Airbnb made finding lodging as easy as opening an app. But with these new toys and technologies come questions. Whether it’s about which regulations apply to disruptive players, what new tech means for existing jobs or why hoverboards keep exploding, there’s a learning curve with integrating new technology into our lives. Here’s the one question everyone should be asking: What does this mean for my insurance? There’s a reason so many people think insurance — what it covers, how it’s sold and more — needs an overhaul. The industry is slow to react, and when finances, security and safety are on the line, you don’t want to be playing catch-up. Do I need insurance for my drone? What does a driverless car mean for auto liability? When the lines of coverage are blurred, it leaves a grey area of confusion at best and a complete gap in protection at worst. The good news is that change is coming (and in some cases is already here). And the opportunity is too big to be ignored for long. Beginning in 2016, we’ll start seeing established companies and newcomers alike move to fill insurance coverage gaps being created by new technology and industries. We’ve already seen changes come, slowly, to the sharing economy — the phrase for the industry that allows everyday folks to use what they already own (like their cars or homes) to provide goods and services to other people. Take Airbnb, for instance. Many people don’t have liability coverage through their homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. If your insurer found out you were using your house as a makeshift bed and breakfast, your policy was Now, though, there are more options for protection. Umbrella policies help cover a wider range of issues. Smaller insurers such as are providing adequate insurance coverage. And even if Airbnb’s Host Protection Coverage and Host Guarantee only provide secondary coverage and don’t completely fill the gap in protection, they show that these companies recognize the need for such products. Leaving your customers out to dry isn’t the best way to build a business. Or look at Uber. There used to be a gap in insurance coverage where an Uber driver would be covered by their own auto insurance when they were off the clock, covered by Uber’s insurance when driving a passenger but covered by neither when they were looking for a customer. Just like with Airbnb, Uber drivers could get their if they tried to file a claim when they were using their car for commercial purposes. Your best solution was hoping you picked up a whole lot of passengers to cover the cost. But in the last few months, we’ve seen rideshare coverage expanding. First it was small companies like , but major insurers like USAA, GEICO, Farmers and MetLife are all stepping up to provide some form of rideshare insurance. The sharing economy has begun to evolve, but there are new professional sectors around the corner that soon will go through the same growing pains. Drones are going to take off in 2016. Even if we don’t get the long-hypothesized utopian drone delivery services we’ve been promised, they’re already in use in some industries; insurance companies, for example, are Some specialized companies provide commercial drone insurance, and earlier this year AIG was the first major player to offer their own insurance. But personal drone use is still underinsured, even with the FAA predicting As with ridesharing, there are use cases for which insurers simply aren’t offering coverage. Does your homeowner insurance cover drones? The answer is a case-by-case “it depends,” which is hardly helpful. The companies that provide comprehensive coverage for all facets of drone ownership, ranging from personal injury liability to hull and body protection, will find a lot of paying customers. Even a sector that has a long history — auto insurance — could be due for a shake-up. Self-driving cars are taking a huge part of the insurance equation out of play by removing drivers, and a whole host of questions pops up with that: Who’s liable for damages? What will an auto insurance policy actually cover? Some analysts think that car insurance as computerized drivers take over and the number of accidents plummet (and we’re shown just how bad at driving we’ve been this whole time). And that’s only for personal use. What about the additional insurance needs for, say, driverless delivery startups? Or the even more complicated scenario of two new industries merging as We’ll fundamentally be changing the way we interact with cars, and insurance will have to change along with it. Will driverless cars hit the road in 2016? Probably not. Ford is predicting But we’re already seeing the beginnings, and insurers should begin looking into their options now or they’ll find themselves on the outside looking in — again. A seemingly persistent problem for people across the globe are data breaches that put our sensitive personal data into the wrong hands. Corporations use to protect themselves from the costs associated with breaches, but it’s time for data breach insurance to spread to the masses. As more and more devices connect online, the so-called Internet of Things, we find ourselves giving to cloud platforms more and more private data ripe for the taking. That’s why data breach insurance will be crucial for both manufacturers and consumers. As we’ve seen with, for example, the Target data breach, it can be costly for the companies who have been hacked to make corrections and satisfy customers’ need for restitution. Data breach insurance will (and does) protect companies from liability costs, but only an estimated That number is going to have to grow as the number of online devices do, or companies are going to find themselves in for a rude awakening in the form of lawsuits, fines and bad publicity. And it’ll be just as important for consumer-facing insurance to come into play if and when personal or financial information is stolen and used against customers. With more and more points of failure introduced, from devices to kids’ toys to appliances and more, it will be important for this protection when the inevitable data breaches do occur. But this additional insurance cost could be offset by the lowering of other insurances. With devices constantly online and talking, sending status reports to different parties, the risk of fire, flood, burglary and more are reduced. Car insurance prices will drop as vehicles become safer, and home protection costs will go down, too, as houses become somewhat unsettlingly self-sufficient. So where do we go from here? Technology isn’t slowing down and waiting for insurance to catch up. But that just means there will already be markets ready to buy protection once insurers join the game. And if they don’t? Well, there will always be newcomers who see a great opportunity. And that’s more dangerous to existing insurers than any exploding hoverboard.
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ISIS Has Its Own Encrypted Chat App
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Josh Constine
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Terrorists are communicating over a new secure Android app after getting kicked off WhatsApp, Telegram, and other messengers. Called “Alrawi”, the encrypted chat app makes it harder for governments and security agencies to spy on terrorist plans. It was discovered by counter-terrorism network known as the , which had previously flagged ISIS communications over Telegram. Alrawi can’t be downloaded from Google Play. Instead it must be installed from shady back alleys of the Internet. This raises the question of how far mobile platforms are willing to go to fight terrorism. Governments are pushing for backdoors through encryption, but perhaps there’s another way to keep people safe without violating privacy for everyone. Apple and Google could easily kick apps used to organize violence out of their official app stores. But would they be willing to build further barriers to usage directly into their mobile operating systems?
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Regulators Should Favor Lyft And Uber, Not Taxis For Safety Reasons
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Sarah Buhr
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take taxis anymore, but I hopped into the taxi line at the Aria in Las Vegas during CES last week for what I figured would be a faster way to get a ride back to my hotel. I didn’t think about being a woman alone at night in a car with a strange, untraceable cab driver — that was a mistake. I decided to leave my group early and get some shut-eye for an early day the next day so I got into a dirty cab alone with a guy who decided to abuse his power as a driver that night, ignoring my need to feel safe in his car. My cab driver began the ride silently (fine by me) but then started asking me the usual about where I’m from and what brought me to town. I told him I was a reporter, here for CES. He asked me how long I was in town for. I said Saturday. He then asked me if I was staying here alone. That was my first inkling this guy might be dangerous. I told him I was here with my work crew and emphasized they would be at the hotel waiting for me, just to make sure he knew others would miss me. He went back to talking about Vegas and I brushed my worry off as paranoia. Cab guy then went back to asking if I was alone and added in a question about whether or not I was single. I’m paired to a wonderful guy but would have told him I had a boyfriend anyway. Then I was asked if I’d like to go hang out right now. My heart started to race, my breaths shortened and I suddenly realized I had no idea where I was in the jungle of Vegas, with a cab driver unattached to an app I could easily trace back to information about him, should something go wrong. “No, I have a boyfriend,” I reiterated, thinking to myself I shouldn’t have to justify my unwillingness to hang out based on whether or not I have a man in my life. But a guy like this one doesn’t care what you want, anyway. He laughed and asked me again. This was a joke to him. Maybe he simply didn’t understand how inappropriate it was to ask out a passenger. I looked out the window at that moment to a scene I remembered was close to my hotel. But then we took a different turn than I’d remembered from the other night. I asked the cab driver about this and he told me it was a shortcut. He continued to chat with me, this time about his love of soccer and how his girlfriend didn’t appreciate him. I didn’t point out he’d just asked me to hang out. I didn’t want to bring that topic in again. I also had no app in front of me to show the correct route like I would with Uber and Lyft, so I quickly fired up Google Maps on my phone to check. We were not going the right way. Was he doing that on purpose? Was he confused? All I knew was I could be in trouble. I corrected him and started to command turn-by-turn directions so he couldn’t veer off again. I was lucky he listened. Finally at my destination, in front of the Marriott Residence Inn, I paid the man and then tried to open the passenger door to let myself out. It turned out I was in one of those vans that rely on the driver to push a button to open the side door for you. Panic again. My driver hopped out instead of simply pushing the button, insisting on physically opening the door for me. “What was your name?” he asked. I lied. He then said he hoped to see me again as I quickly walked away from him, thankful to be free. Should I report the guy? I didn’t have an app to alert anyone right away, but I could call the cab company, right? I thought to turn back and memorize the license plate…but where was the license plate? I couldn’t find it! The driver noticed and got a look on his face. He knew what I was looking for and asked if something was wrong. I couldn’t find his license on the back of his van. Was it there and I was just too panicked to notice? It wasn’t in the usual spot. Really anyone can pretend to be a cab driver for a night and get into a taxi line. There’s no way to track the driver like you can on a ride sharing platform. I told him nothing was wrong and walked inside. I just wanted to get away at that point. Was I overreacting? Did I make up this situation in my head? I was scared and frustrated I had to think about things a man alone on the town wouldn’t have to think about. I had so trustingly lined up and gotten in a random cab. There was no way of easily warning another lone woman who might also take a ride with that guy that night, or that week, or ever. No way to complain about inappropriate advances. There was no app for that and no way to trace him if he didn’t deliver me back to my hotel, either. He was just a random cab driver in a taxi line and no one thought anything of it. Regulators should take note of this experience and for the good of public safety, allow Uber and Lyft, not taxis, to utilize the ride lines, instead. This is not about fairness to drivers. You can track rideshare drivers using technology and complain about the bad ones on these platforms. You can’t do that with cabs. Taxi lobbyists have taken a very active role against ridesharing, spending large amounts to ensure legislation favors the incumbent service. They would likely take issue with my proposal. However, this isn’t about what’s fair to cab drivers. This is a safety issue. The argument the taxi lobby gives against ridesharing is taxi drivers have thousands of driving hours under their belt and know the city they are driving in well. That’s true for many, if not most, but my driver seemed confused on how to get to my hotel. There are plenty of anecdotes out there of cabbies taking the long way or going another route just for a higher fare, too. Unlike with ridesharing, those drivers get away with it. The other argument is that taxi drivers have gone through the requisite licensing and paid their dues to operate as drivers and that Lyft and Uber unfairly displace these drivers. That is tough for taxi drivers. But the taxi lobby’s aim is to protect its turf. Given my recent experience, my safety is not the primary concern. The taxi industry needs to see that times are changing and people want to use ridesharing because it is a better, safer service that benefits the rider. Regulators have relaxed a bit in Sin City. Lyft and Uber were able to there starting late last year. Progress! But there’s still improvements to be made. It wasn’t as convenient to use Lyft and Uber the rest of my time in Vegas. The taxi line was easier to find and much faster to catch a ride there, but I decided, after my experience, it was the safer option to call up Lyft or Uber (whichever looked like it would be faster). I just wish regulators saw it the same way as a woman traveling alone at night in Vegas, or any other city, might.
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Notify Nearby Launches To Help Fashion Brands Share Deals And Content
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Anthony Ha
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At this point, we’ve probably all heard (or experienced!) the scenario where you’re walking past a store and your phone buzzes to alert you about nearby deals. The challenge, though, is sending a message that’s actually interesting, useful and maybe even exciting, rather than annoying. Nevin Jethmalani, co-founder and CEO of , said he’s had that experience himself — he was driving to a friend’s house and, thanks to Shopkick, “Some random company sent me a push notification.” “I thought, ‘This is just terrible, this is a reason I would uninstall this app,'” Jethmalani said. So he’s trying to deliver a better experience with , which launched earlier this week. (The Android app is coming soon.) Like pretty much every location-based marketing startup, Notify Nearby uses beacon technology and location data to show you nearby deals, but the key here is that you’re following the brands that you choose — companies currently in the app include Tory Burch, Saks Fifth Avenue and Levi’s. Once you’ve opted in, you should be able to follow all the fashion brands that interest you. Some of those brands are actively posting, while in others have given Notify Nearby permission to post content that they’ve shared elsewhere. Since it’s more about following companies then getting random deals and alerts, Jethmalani compared his app to . The difference, he said, is that Spring focuses on showcasing products that you can actually buy (we’ve described it as ), while Notify Nearby is more about fashion content. Asked what kind of content will succeed, Jethmalani acknowledged, “Of course, because of the way human nature is, promotions will do the best. But strong pieces of content [can include] product launches, new collaborations, exclusives. If someone posts a product launch to our app, that’s something people are going to find really appealing.” The beacon functionality may be the cool new thing, but the app’s beacon integrations are mostly in New York for now. (“We can’t just saturate the country with beacons.”) But even without those features, everyone else can still use Notify Nearby to follow brands and see their latest content. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgs-4QYtS_Q&w=560&h=315]
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Dating App Newbie Blume Wants To Kill Catfishing With Ephemeral Selfies
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Natasha Lomas
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Make room for yet another dating app. San Francisco-based is hoping to entice singles into its arms with a real-time selfie feature designed to thwart catfishing. So no more being chatted up by sex-mad robots. Or wooed by forlorn hopers overselling their dating prospects with a set of out-of-date/overly processed photos. In a further twist on the prevailing dating app recipe, Blume adds in a little ephemeral frisson too, with the real-time selfie only being shown for seven seconds, before disappearing – during which period the user must decide whether they do want to match with the person in the photo or not. If both Blume users confirm the match they unlock each other’s full profiles (i.e. of non-real-time selfie photos) plus the usual one-on-one messaging function. So there’s both an initial mutual match process, and a follow up real-time selfie match for confirmation. What’s the point of matching twice? It’s designed to add a curation layer to dating interactions, says CEO and co-founder Daniel Delouya, in a bid to help users cut through the noise (i.e. the potential match choice) of the dating pool and sharpen their focus on a smaller selection of potential mates. The thinking being that while there are always plenty more fish in the sea, if you make fishing the ocean as easy as swiping a touchscreen then people seem to find it remarkably hard to know when to stop swiping and start settling. At a certain point along the axis of proliferating choice, dating apparently becomes synonymous with windowshopping… which is not a great recipe for closing the deal. Or finding The One. Or just getting a date. Blume aims to help Generation Dating App narrow their choices by simultaneously slowing the selection process down and making it more involved – yet also fun. So it’s two deliberate steps, rather than just one swipe. Here’s Delouya’s take on the wrinkle Blume is zeroing in on: “Dating apps have a problem with oversaturation. They tend to be about meeting new people by getting matches that you can communicate with. The more matches you get the higher social stimulation you get. If there’s too much stimulation by getting too many matches, the satisfaction of actually interacting with new people gets oversaturated. This ultimately takes away what was once intended to be a personal experience meeting new people, which results in people not communicating with each other. “When it’s too easy getting matches it takes the seriousness out of it. This was one of the reasons we founded Blume. We wanted people to create a platform where people actually have to invest in their match in order to start talking together.” By “invest” he means take the time to snap and send a selfie, as well as subsequently taking the time to make a deliberate assessment of a potential match’s selfie – albeit, we’re only talking a few seconds of time here. But paradoxically the fact there are only a few, enforced seconds for a final selection to take place makes the user focus more intently on the choice. Or that’s the theory. “It’s basic psychology, if you make people invest time and effort they are more likely to become emotionally attached to the product, and in this case, the other person they’re matching with,” he says. “Once the match actually happens, both parties are certain that the other party were also keen on making the match happen (thereby making certain both parties are mutually interested to get the conversation going), and that leads to MUCH better communication between them. And the data proves it works. Over 68% of people who match fully on Blume initiate a conversation,” Delouya adds. In the transactional dating apps space you can almost forgive him for that Freudian slip turn of phrase, which turns people into ‘products’. Although the choice of word does rather underline the wider problem with the dating app category; it intentionally (or inevitably) cheapens emotional interactions by presenting people as disposable. Cards to be flipped through in an idle moment and discarded at will. At least Blume, the product, is an attempt to put a little emotional emphasis back into digital date selection, with its requirement that users spend up to seven seconds contemplating a potential match. (Perhaps a future iteration of the product could require an initially matched pair to actually make eye contact for seven seconds in real-time, over a silent video call… After which it would presumably be rather harder to view dating app profiles as just so much disposable ‘product’.) Blume soft-launched in the U.S. in late November and has some 25,000 users at this nascent stage. While the team is based in San Francisco they originally hail from Denmark and have raised a small, pre-seed round ($250k) from three Danish Business Angels and early stage Danish VC firm to get the app launched. Delouya confirms they are now looking to raise a proper seed round — “preferably from the Valley”. Unsurprisingly, given its real-time ephemeral selfie focus, Blume’s early adopters skew younger, with the majority (65 per cent) being aged 18 to 24 years old, followed by a further quarter being 25 to 34, according to Delouya. “We’re definitely targeting a younger audience, and/or people who’re familiar with Snapchat,” he tells TechCrunch. Isn’t there a Snapchattish risk of users being sent rude pictures rather than selfies, given the ephemeral element? Yes, concedes Delouya, but he reckons this won’t be a big problem — and that people who do flash others with a crotchie, i.e. rather than sending a real-time selfie, are likely to find it’s not a very good strategy to acquire a confirmed dating match. Which, while probably true, does rather gloss over the risk of flashers using the app to just, well, flash strangers — and while you can of course decline to with a dick pic, you can’t an unexpected schlong. So, yeah… “People can report inappropriate pictures, which we then can take action on (e.g issue a warning, or exclude people from the app),” says Delouya when pressed on this point. “I do believe people will be less inhibited in a good way since these selfies are meant to show people as they are, and not perfected profile pictures,” he adds. “I’m quite confident that people will behave in terms of inappropriate pictures as the ones potentially doing it will get nothing out of it. They ruined their chance of matching with someone on the app by doing so, and will most likely be reported and banned from the app.” What about rival dating apps that already offer some kind of verification process for the truthfulness of users’ profile photos? He argues Blume’s real-time selfie element is a more “simple, modern” — aka youth-demographic-friendly — workaround for the catfishing problem. Blume is not the first dating to come up with the idea of mandating a real-time selfie. Gender asymmetrical dating app also had a requirement that users snap a fresh, time-stamped selfie for their profile pic, when it launched back in 2014 (although without any ephemeral twist). “I came up with the idea after trying some dating apps, and immediately saw these problems,” says Blume’s 21-year-old co-founder. “I constantly had to ask my matches people for their Snapchat or Facebook in order to confirm their identity, and that’s something I know most people can identify with, as I discovered myself that I wasn’t the only one doing so. “Also, the vast amount of bots on Tinder and other dating apps really destroys the environment that’s about meeting new people. I thought there had to be a better solution… So I immediately started working on Blume with two other guys.” Of course there are now scores of ‘post-Tinder’ dating apps with a twist or two, whether their skew is aiming to give women more control over the selection process (e.g. ), or to — or, er, — so Blume joins a packed pool of dating app tiddlers all chasing the Tinder leviathan. But it’s a measure of the latter’s success in pulling digital dating out of the desktop web era that there’s now such a colorful entourage of dating apps to choose from. Whether there’s too much choice on that front too is perhaps another pertinent question. Tinder for dating apps anyone?
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Book It, Baby
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Jon Evans
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Remember e-books? Those were the days, weren’t they? Those crazy few years when the fad of reading on a Kindle swept the nation. Now, of course, that fit of mass hysteria is behind us. E-book sales are , down more than 10% in 2015 — — while . Yes, that’s right; print is regaining its regal primacy; e-books are dead. Right? You look suspicious. How strange. It’s almost as if you think that because those numbers come from the Association of American Publishers, they might indicate something rather different from the death of the e-book; they might be a signifier of the rise of smaller publishers not tracked by the AAP, and/or, the growth of online reading via eg or Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. that what we’re seeing is that AAP publishers “have seen their collective share of the US ebook market collapse.” Mathew Ingram in Fortune , “Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?” Somehow I don’t think Amazon is . They added three million new Prime members this Christmas season, who can use Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library to check out free books. Those don’t count as e-book sales. Neither does Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service. I’m only one data point, but I’ve published eight books (cf the image up top) and I can tell you that, for me at least, the ratio of “books read through Kindle Unlimited” to “Kindle copies sold” is about 8:1. Also, via John Scalzi’s : . A publisher's take: ebook sales inflated as people bought up backlist releases. Now down to more realistic levels overall. — Beth Meacham (@bethmeacham) I understand that publishers mostly e-books to fail, largely because Amazon controls even more of the e-book market than the dead-tree market. An understandable concern. I love Amazon, but is its good for authors? Probably not. (And in the long run, what isn’t good for authors isn’t good for readers, unless prices go crazy-high.) …But then, traditional publishers’ walled gardens weren’t great for many authors either. Even if you managed to fight your way into that walled garden, if you didn’t have a quick hit with your first few books, you were often soon frozen out. The legendary “ ” predated e-books; some say it even predated Amazon. I propose that today’s status quo is actually pretty good for authors and readers. We suddenly have a huge spectrum of publishing options, to fit every possibility. Publishers perform — think of them as the VCs of the book world — but, in the same way that you don’t need a bazillion dollars from a big-name VC to launch a startup any more, you no longer need a Big Five publisher to get your book out the world. The indies, the micro-publishers, the self-publishers, the — there’s room for everyone. So why doesn’t this status quo great? Because it provokes intense anxiety in everyone: publishers, authors, and readers. Well, publishers, obviously, have to deal with the Amazon devil, whether they like it or not; and they have to worry about the cannibalization of their industry by micropublishers, online publishers, etc. Their share of the pie is shrinking (although it’s not going away.) For authors, there used to be a well-known and well-understood path to success. A winding mountain path full of cliffs and high winds and deadly monsters, but a path nonetheless. Now publishing is more like a trackless jungle. You have to somehow find your way through it with no map, no compass, a , and a vague sense that the moss might grow on the north side of the trees, while hoping that you don’t walk under any . As for readers — they no longer know where to go to read the next book that transforms how they see the world. Buy a book on Amazon? Physical or e-? Or go to Smashwords, because you’ve heard they’re better for authors? Trek out to a physical bookstore? Check out something from Kindle Unlimited and/or the Kindle Lending Library, for free, before you commit your money? Surf through Wattpad or Feedbooks? It’s the anxiety of choice. Books are really in the business of attention, and consideration, and they have more and more competition. YouTube; Twitter links; TV bingewatching (some with depth and complexity that rivals that of great novels); Netflix movies; in short, what amounts to the instant accessibility of the entire library of human creativity, for free or cheap. Plus, of course, other books, an ever-growing number of other books, because the number of interesting new books published every year surely must exceed the number that become culturally irrelevant. Whatever else happens, I promise you this, we’ll keep reading, because reading a book remains one of the most emotionally and intellectually powerful experiences available to us as human beings. Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly — grumplestiltskin (@KatieOldham) But if you ask me, what we really need is not more authors, or better publishers. What we most need is a vastly better system to identify the books we will love, without having to invest so much time and mental effort into a book before coming to the conclusion that (for this particular reader) it’s no more than mediocre. Build the mousetrap of better book discovery, and I for one will steamroller a trail to your door.
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Real Customer Choice For T-Mobile’s Binge On Requires Transparency, Opt-In
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Jeremy Gillula
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If you’ve been paying attention, you probably noticed the recent headlines about T-Mobile CEO John Legere and his anti-EFF mini-rant on Twitter. Legere was responding to a question we had asked about T-Mobile’s Binge On service: “Does Binge On alter the video stream in any way, or just limit its bandwidth?” But it apparently made him angry enough to drop an f-bomb on us. . — John Legere (@JohnLegere) He’s since and : user choice and ISP transparency. We are grateful for his apology, and we agree with him. It’s important to focus on the underlying issues instead of being distracted by color commentary. So let’s talk about the issues. We want to start by clearly stating our position on Binge On, the carrier’s video-streaming product that lets users stream video without using their data. We think Binge On has great promise. Providing customers a way to control how they use their data is something more ISPs should offer, and in this respect we think Binge On contains the kernel of a good idea.
The most serious problem with Binge On, as it is now, is that T-Mobile has imposed throttling its customers’ making an informed choice to participate. T-Mobile made Binge On opt-out, which means that, by default, all T-Mobile customers were having all of their video throttled. As , throttling all traffic by default based on application type runs afoul of well-established open Internet principles. Again, we’re not arguing that exchanging throttling for zero-rating isn’t a benefit for some people; we just think people should be able to make that choice themselves, instead of having it thrust upon them. Although the option to opt-out constitutes some level of consumer choice, it’s important to recognize that defaults matter, and that a lot of customers (especially less tech-savvy ones) will never even realize that they can change them. Additionally, T-Mobile hasn’t been transparent and honest with its users about how Binge On actually works. As a result, the opt- “choice” customers have been presented with hasn’t been an informed one. When it launched Binge On back in November, T-Mobile that “Powered by new technology built in to T-Mobile’s network, Binge On optimizes video for mobile screens, minimizing data consumption while still delivering DVD or better quality (e.g. 480p or better).” Similarly, on the , it says that Binge On “uses video streaming optimization…to deliver a DVD quality (typically 480p or better) video experience with minimal buffering while streaming.” And last week, Legere said that “we created adaptive video technology to optimize for mobile screens and stream at a bitrate designed to stretch your data.” To anyone from the average user to a Ph.D. in computer science, these descriptions of what Binge On does seem pretty straightforward. When you go to stream a video, T-Mobile’s “video streaming optimization” technology should automatically optimize the video for your mobile screen. Trying to stream an HD (or heaven forbid, a 4K) video to your tiny screen, or download one for watching later? T-Mobile will save you data by ensuring that you actually get a 480p video instead. The problem is, that’s not how Binge On actually works. Binge On does not adapt video in any way, shape, or form. It doesn’t optimize video. It doesn’t down-sample video. It doesn’t modify the bitrate of the underlying video stream. It does not automatically transform HD video into 480p video. All Binge On does is cap the bandwidth allocated to the video stream to around 1.5Mbps. We call that “throttling.” T-Mobile calls it “downgrading.” (For the record, we think that’s also a misleading term, since downgrading implies video streams are simply being given a lower priority than other traffic. If that were true, then in the absence of higher priority traffic, videos should stream at the same throughput as any other content. But that’s not the case: our tests showed that video streams are capped at around 1.5Mbps even when there’s no congestion.) Whatever you call it, T-Mobile does not actually modify the content of video that enters its network. So why does T-Mobile keep insisting that Binge On will result in 480p non-buffering-super-smooth streaming video? Because for some services, it will. Many major streaming video services, from Netflix to YouTube, automatically detect how much bandwidth is available for their video streams to use. They then adapt the quality of the video they send out, so that it streams smoothly. In other words, they detect that T-Mobile is capping the bandwidth, and optimize the video they send. Some (including Legere) have argued that this is just semantics. Video gets adapted one way or another, so what’s the problem? The problem is that not all videos adapt automatically by default. Simple embedded HTML5 video, for example, doesn’t have any built-in adaptation capability. When fixed bitrate videos like these hit throttling on T-Mobile’s network, playback will stutter or fail. In order to reach T-Mobile’s customers without playback issues, an independent provider like a journalist, startup or university would need to build or purchase a system to monitor for and adapt to such throttling. Additionally, T-Mobile is throttling video , not just streams. So if you’re trying to save a video to watch for later, you’ll eventually get the HD or 4K video file and you’ll use just as much data as you would otherwise, but you’re in for a longer wait than necessary. More than anything, this exposes the fact that T-Mobile’s implementation of Binge On doesn’t actually do any optimization—after all, if it were all about streaming optimization, Binge On wouldn’t touch downloads. . In order for customers to make informed choices, and in order for websites to be able to reach those customers, the public needs technically accurate information about how ISPs manage their networks. If you were a T-Mobile customer who blamed a website when you had trouble trying to stream an HD video, your blame would be misplaced, because T-Mobile didn’t clearly describe how Binge On works. And if you were a web developer who wanted T-Mobile customers to be able to download your videos, you might assume that they’d download as fast as any other file, but you’d be wrong, because T-Mobile didn’t clearly describe how Binge On works. Certainly there are secondary issues with Binge On. T-Mobile is throttling all videos, not just those of streaming providers who have signed up with T-Mobile. That wasn’t as clear as it could have been at first. T-Mobile is also throttling videos that it’s not zero-rating, when it could at least try to zero-rate them (even if it couldn’t commit to doing so). And even when zero-rating programs are open to all edge providers for free (like Binge On), they still tilt the playing field toward larger providers who have the resources to enroll and adapt their video streams to compensate for throttling (and even realize that they need to). But for now, our biggest concern with Binge On is about a major ISP being honest and clear with its customers, and whether or not that ISP gives its customers a real, informed choice about how to manage their data. We’ve heard that many of T-Mobile’s customers appreciate Binge On. We may not love it ourselves, but we don’t think T-Mobile needs to abolish the program completely—it just needs to make some changes to how it works, how customers can choose to use it, and how T-Mobile describes it to the public. We think those changes would not only allow customers (and website developers) to make better informed decisions, they would benefit the Internet as a whole. In his post this week, Legere emphasized how supportive he and T-Mobile are of net neutrality. But net neutrality isn’t just about treating traffic neutrally, and it’s not even just about giving customers control. It’s also about being transparent with network management practices. To promote meaningful customer choice, Binge On should be opt-in and the program should be clearly explained. And to avoid discriminating among sources of online video, T-Mobile should not zero-rate throttled video while counting throttled video towards the user’s data cap. We hope that Mr. Legere agrees that taking these steps to improve Binge On would be a good thing for his customers and the Internet at large.
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Apple Is Reportedly Developing Long Distance Wireless Charging For iPads And iPhones
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Jon Russell
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Apple is reportedly developing technology that would allow iPhone and iPad owners to charge their device without needing to plug it into the wall or place it on a charging mat. That’s according to which claims the wireless charging tech could work over unspecified long distances. Bloomberg speculated that the “cutting-edge” charging could appear in Apple devices released next year, so that would rule it out of making its way into the upcoming iPhone 7, which is expected to arrive later this year on cue with Apple’s usual launch schedule. Right now, the best “wireless” charging phones don’t require a direct power connection but must be in contact with a mat or charger. If Apple can package genuine wireless charging into future products, that’ll help the iPhone and iPad further stand apart from competition. And, also, potentially make life a lot easier for Apple customers, particularly if (per rumors) and the lightning outlet becomes open for a headphones connection.
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Sony Posts $1B Profit For Q3 2015 But Feels Pinch From Slowing Mobile Market
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Jon Russell
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Another quarter of promise for Sony. The Japanese tech giant just its Q3 2015 financial results, posting net income of 120.1 billion JPY ($1 billion) on total revenue of 2,580.8 billion JPY ($21.5 billion) — those figures are up 33.5 percent and 0.5 percent year-on-year. Operating income came in at 202.1 billion JPY ($1.7 billion), an 11 percent rise on a year previous. Those figures surpassed analyst expectations — according to — and follow , which include a slim $280 million profit. However, Sony continues to struggle on mobile. In Q3 2015, its mobile business unit saw its total revenue decline 14.7 percent to 384.5 billion JPY ($3.2 billion), although operating revenue grew by 133 percent to $201 million. That’s because Sony is scaling back its struggling smartphone business, in the face of struggles across the industry as global smartphone sales growth continues to slow. In Sony’s words: “this decrease was due to a significant decrease in smartphone unit sales resulting from a strategic decision not to pursue scale in order to improve profitability.” The company added that reduced spend on marketing and promotion, coupled with “a shift to high value-added models,” improved the operating revenue figure significantly. Instead it was the company’s chip business, which has grown thanks to image sensors used by a number of phone makers, which dragged. That division carded an operating loss of 11.7 billion JPY ($97 million) as revenue dropped 12.6 percent on account of “a decrease in demand for mobile products, and a significant decrease in battery business sales,” Sony said. So, while Sony has cut its reliance on smartphones sold to consumers, it couldn’t entirely shelter itself from the chill affecting the mobile industry, which hit it in its sensor business instead. Away from mobile, PlayStation continues to be a bright spot for Sony. Its video games console business posting a 10 percent increase in quarterly revenue as operating profit jumped 45 percent to reach 40.2 billion JPY ($335 million). Sony put these changes down to a previous write-down of PS Vita and PS TV components, and an increase in PlayStation 4 sales. Elsewhere, Sony’s imaging business — responsible for digital/video cameras — saw revenue drop 5 percent to $1.6 billion, but operating profit rise 20 percent to $197 million. It was a similar story for the company’s home entertainment — revenue down 4.3 percent to $3.35 billion, profit up 19.8 percent to $260 million — while Sony’s music and pictures businesses both contributed profit ($228 million and $170 million) based on increased revenue for the quarter — up 8.2 percent and 26.9 percent respectively.
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NASA Rover Designed To Last 90 Days Celebrates 12 Year Anniversary
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Emily Calandrelli
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This week NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover celebrated its 12 year anniversary on the red planet. What’s truly remarkable about this is the fact that the rover was only designed to operate for about 90 days. Due to helpful unforeseen surface conditions and few creative software changes, NASA has been able to keep Opportunity alive and operational to this day. After a six-and-a-half month journey from Earth, Opportunity entered the Martian atmosphere and used a parachute, retrorockets, and a cocoon of airbags to land safely on the surface back in January of 2004. One of the reasons NASA believed the rover would only function properly for 90 Martian days was because of the extreme level of dust on Mars. This dust was predicted to build up on Opportunity’s solar panels and eventually, the rover would be unable to receive power. Receiving solar power on Mars, which is 50 percent farther away from the Sun than Earth, was a known challenge even without the dust. NASA designed Opportunity’s solar panels to be as wide as possible in order to collect as much sunlight as it could. Even so, the lifetime of Opportunity was measured in days, perhaps months, but certainly not years. Luckily, a surprising thing happened: every once in a while, whirling columns of air, or “dust devils,” swept over the rover and cleaned off the coating of dust from the solar panels. This was a godsend to Opportunity and the NASA team who operated it. Dust build up would continue to be a challenge, but Martian dust devils have helped keep the rover’s lights on. Collecting sufficient solar power wasn’t the only problem Mars threw NASA’s way. In its first year, Opportunity found itself slightly buried in a sand dune. Engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recreated the scenario with an Opportunity mock-up and identified a sequence of wheel rotations that would ultimately set the rover free. In addition to hardware issues, Opportunity’s software has required a few upgrades over the years. NASA had to perform remote software updates to improve the rover’s visual detection, photography, and hazard detection capabilities. Sending a rover all the way to Mars is expensive. It’s a fraction of the price of sending a human there, but it still cost NASA $400 million to build Opportunity and get it on the surface. Squeezing more science out of that expensive rover helps enable NASA to justify the time and money it took to get it there. The fact that NASA has kept the rover operational for 12 years is a feat of engineering and ingenuity, but agrees that NASA should keep it running. It costs about $14 million per year to operate Opportunity and it’s just not as capable as it once was. Two of Opportunity’s scientific instruments no longer work, its joints occasionally lock up, and it experiences periods of due to problems with its flash memory. Even so, the rover continues to accomplish useful scientific work. In recent years, researchers used Opportunity to examine a series of large craters in order to get a look at older layers of Mars’ history. The rover has also been one of the keys to understanding the role of liquid water in the planet’s past, which will help scientists learn if life ever existed there. Impressively, Opportunity has achieved the record of traveling the longest distance on another planet and continues to send back never before seen images of Mars. While it may be a fixer-upper after spending over a decade in harsh Martian conditions, it remains a crucial asset to NASA as well as our understanding of Mars. After 12 years, Opportunity pushes onward.
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Walgreens Halts Use Of Theranos’ California Lab
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Sarah Buhr
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More bad news for blood analysis startup Theranos – Walgreens has suspended use of the company’s Newark, California lab, following news the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said that lab posed “immediate jeopardy” to patients. Walgreens partners with Theranos, allowing the startup to collect blood draws out of many of the drug store’s Arizona locations and one in Palo Alto. The blood samples are then sent to Theranos labs. Theranos has said the CMS findings were not related to its Arizona lab “where we currently process over 90 percent of our tests.” Walgreens sent a statement to explain the action: In light of the letter dated Jan. 25 from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to Theranos, Inc., Walgreens said today that it has informed Theranos that it must immediately cease sending any clinical laboratory tests provided through Theranos Wellness Centers at Walgreens to the Theranos lab in Newark, Calif., for analysis. In addition, Walgreens is suspending Theranos laboratory services at its Palo Alto, Calif., store, effective immediately. Theranos has more recently had to retain services from outside labs to process some samples rather than use its own labs and machines, including ARUP Labs in Salt Lake City, Utah. According to the Walgreens statement, all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers in Arizona “must be sent only to Theranos’ certified lab in the Phoenix area or to an accredited third-party lab for analysis.” Walgreens opened up a task force to look into earlier claims regarding Theranos’ practices and an FDA investigation. Walgreens now says it is in discussions about the next steps in the relationship.
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Susa Ventures Looks to Raise $50 Million Second Fund
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Connie Loizos
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, a 2.5-year-old, seed-stage firm with offices in San Francisco, New York, and L.A. , is looking to raise up to $50 million for a second fund, two years after raising a debut fund. The SEC filing is . Susa has four general partners: Eva Ho, who was most recently the VP of marketing and operations at venture-backed and a senior product marketing manager at Google for five years before that; Leo Polovets, most recently a senior software engineer at Factual who also logged time at Google and was one of LinkedIn’s earliest engineers; Seth Berman, who was most recently the VP of strategic marketing at the Richemont Group, a publicly traded company that owns luxury brands like Cartier and Chloe; and Chad Byers, who was most recently a senior director at the advertising company and a marketing analyst at Silver Spring Networks before that. LPs in the firm’s debut fund include mostly individual investors from the venture and private equity sector, as well as CEOs and founders from the tech community, as Ho told us when it closed. Susa, which invests in companies that are heavily reliant on data as an enabling platform, lists 29 companies at its site. Among its better-known bets are , the commission-free, mobile-first stock brokerage; , which builds credit products for people who banks turn away, from payday loans to credit cards; and , which helps marketers determine which doctor, hospitals and clinics might be amenable to working with a specific drug, as well as charts the differences in patients who take a drug as part of a clinical trial so researchers can track its effectiveness. All have gone on to raise sizable rounds of venture-funding.
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Paul Allen’s Yacht Blamed For Destroying Coral Reef
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Connie Loizos
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, the investment firm of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, features a practice area that aims to “reduce our impact on the environment, particularly local watershed and ocean habitats.” So you can imagine it more than a little embarrassing when Allen’s 300-foot yacht, Tatoosh, was accused yesterday of destroying a coral reef in the Cayman Islands that has been in an officially designated protected zone for the past 30 years. Allen wasn’t on the boat at the time, but according to the , its anchor and chain recently wrecked roughly 14,000 square feet of reef and damaged more than 80 percent of the coral in the area. Vulcan has since , saying that on the day the damage was incurred, January 14, the crew was only following the instructions of the local Port Authority, and that when the crew was alerted by a diver that the anchor chain “may have impacted coral in the area, the crew promptly, and on their own accord, relocated their position to ensure the reef was protected.” The statemement adds that “Vulcan Inc. and Paul G. Allen have a long history of responsible exploration and a commitment to ocean conservation,” including, ironically, a research project intended to . An investigation by local authorities is ongoing. Tatoosh, which has multiple helicopter pads, a basketball court, a swimming pool, and a movie theater and is staffed by 35 crew members, isn’t Allen’s only yacht. He also owns an even bigger yacht called the Octopus that’s equipped with a pool, two helicopters, a movie theater, basketball court, recording studio, and 40 guest suites.
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The App Ecosystem’s New Status Quo
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Zeev Farbman
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Americans spent more time using smartphone and tablet applications in 2014 than they did mobile and desktop web combined. With to be in use by 2020, the platform shift to mobile is well underway. The smartphone supply chain has already become a central and unifying aspect of the tech industry. For the first time, there exists a ubiquitous technology that connects us all to a central ecosystem, and apps form a huge part of this. The bar is constantly rising for mobile, and if we accept the “mobilization” of the future as a given, then what we are seeing is only just the very beginning. Many people still view apps as unsophisticated software with simple, one-dimensional functionality. This perception, however, is going to change. With the widespread adoption of mobile devices and the continued improvement of the hardware layer, alongside the creation of a robust app economy, it has become possible for us to access incredibly powerful software quite literally from the palms of our hands. As the app ecosystem continues to evolve, and developers continue to push the boundaries of technology available to consumers, expectations of highly advanced app functionality will rise in kind. This demand will ensure that apps be built exclusively on a core of premium software. Consumers have long been agreeable to paying for high-quality desktop software, and as the mobile app ecosystem continues to evolve, paying for quality software on mobile will become the norm. As mobile apps become more sophisticated in power and UX, and increasingly relied upon in everyday life, there will be a paradigm shift in payment models. As an economic model, the market domination of free apps is not sustainable — especially in fields that require substantial R&D, which is costly. If the system is to evolve and apps are to become more relevant to day-to-day life, they must be capitalized in accordance with their real-life value. Prices will rise and payment models like freemium, single payment and subscription models will become more widely utilized for new apps entering the market, as opposed to relying so heavily on in-app advertising. The creation of app stores solved a major distribution problem for software developers. App stores dramatically lowered the barriers of entry, creating the potential for software distribution at a scale and speed that was never before possible — allowing new companies to rise quickly out of obscurity and become significant players. This, in turn, led to the market infusion of more diverse designs and more innovative software, and enabled smaller, less-funded players to enter the market with a greater effect. In the software world, big-name and financially backed companies traditionally had a huge advantage in their existing distribution channels, making it much easier for them to dominate the desktop market. If Adobe wanted to roll out a new product, they had the means of large-scale dissemination — much more easily, certainly, than for new players in the field. For young upstarts, coming up with the resources necessary to challenge Adobe on desktop is a difficult task. However, rising to dominance on mobile is something we know very well to be possible for a company that hasn’t even raised one dollar of capital. The new market structure has changed the rules, allowing for a fairer system based on meritocracy that was not necessarily possible in the desktop era. Thus, app stores essentially allow for new players to more effectively compete. In the near future, we can expect to see far more new and innovative players stepping in and becoming serious contenders in the form of mobile-first technologies from a wealth of hungry new companies. Distinguished old players are going to fall by the wayside if they fail to take hold on mobile. Lowering the barriers of entry created the proper environment for competition and an explosion of innovation. As a result, app quality is going to skyrocket. The idea that apps are simple programs with limited functionality is an idea that is going to dissipate into a past reality within the coming years, as the technical quality of future releases creates rapid advances, thanks to the ecosystem the app stores have created. As the union of technical prowess, product dissemination and app relevance unfolds, the status quo of how we relate to mobile apps will fall away, and a new set of standards will take their place.
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Lockscreen App Slidejoy Gets A Newsy New Feature
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that rewards users for putting news and advertising on their Android lockscreens, has unveiled a more comprehensive newsreading experience. Co-founder Sanghoon Kwak led the development of the new Trends feature, and he said that previously, if you were reading news on Slidejoy, you saw one article at a time, and they came from about a dozen publishers. Slidejoy Trends, on the other hand, pulls stories from more than 500 sites, and it allows you to see a number of stories in a given category. (Slidejoy doesn’t have direct relationships with all of those publishers — ultimately, it’s just pointing you to someone else’s web page.) Put another way, the startup is getting closer to becoming a full-fledged news app. It allows you to browse the top news in categories like Tech and Business — the rankings are based on things like the publication time of the news and the interest shown by other readers. Users can also choose to follow stories from specific publishers. What Slidejoy doing is personalizing the stories you see, so you’re only presented with the ones that the app thinks you’ll like. “A lot of the news apps … focus too much on personalization,” Kwak said. “Even before you see a news item, they want to know about what you like, what topics you want to follow. I think that inherently limits the scope of the news you get.” Co-founder and CEO Robert Seo added that the company’s long-term goal is to become “the gateway to your phone.” “We just wanted to provide an easy way to provide users with access to all those different features,” he said. “Improving the news feature is just one aspect of that.”
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Facebook Shutters Its Parse Developer Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
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Here’s a surprise: Facebook is its developer platform. After acquiring the service, which at the time mostly focused on mobile developers, for a in 2013, Facebook turned Parse into one of its key developer services. Parse will still operate until January 28, 2017, so developers have time to move their products over to other platforms. That will still be quite a hassle for the devs behind the 600,000 apps built on the platform. Forcing developers into changes, especially ones as drastic as this, can shake their trust. In the future when Facebook opens opportunities for developers, like the we recently discovered, they might be apprehensive about investing time and resources into platforms from a company with a poor history of continued support. Parse — and its CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar — prominently featured in Facebook’s developer conference keynotes, too. Sukhar, however, left Facebook last year and it’s been a while since we last heard about the service. Here’s a video about what Parse did: “We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible,” Parse’s other co-founder Kevin Lacker writes in today’s announcement. “We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.” The company says it will offer a number of tools for and it’s also open-sourcing the Parse Server so developers will run most of the Parse API from their own (or one hosted on a platform like Heroku). The idea behind using a service like Parse, however, has always been that developers could avoid dealing with servers, so it remains to be seen how many of its current users will make this switch. Facebook’s decision to shutter Parse definitely comes as a massive surprise — not in the least to the developers who have came to rely on it over the last few years. But the overall landscape has changed since 2013. Amazon, Google and Microsoft (and numerous other startups) now offer very similar tools for developers. It’s unclear how much traction Parse still had in the last year or so, but Facebook probably looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth its effort anymore. The situation harkens back to the dark days of developer whiplash on Facebook’s web games platform, circa 2009. Facebook frequently made significant changes to what developers could do and how virality worked with little notice. That left developers with broken apps and lost business potential they were depending on. This whiplash got so bad that developers became vocal critics of Facebook’s actions — not unlike now: Parse is the key trend on Twitter in SF right now and the dev channels I participate in are up in arms — Matthäus Krzykowski (@matthausk) Facebook eventually had to drum up a big campaign called in hopes of reassuring devs that it would be more cautious and communicative about changing its platform. You can feel the legacy of that effort in the fact that Parse will remain available for an entire year before it shuts down. Yet still, it feels like Facebook has once again put its bottom line above the well being of its developer family.
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Apple Pay Is Coming To ATMs From Bank Of America And Wells Fargo
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Josh Constine
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Both Bank Of America and Wells Fargo are working on integrating Apple Pay into their ATMs, according to a source familiar with the teams on the projects. Engineers at both companies have been placed on multi-month assignments to build the Apple Pay options. I’ve confirmed the identity of at least one engineer who publicly lists themselves as a Bank Of America employee. Wells Fargo’s head of ATMs Jonathan Velline implied Apple Pay would come to its ATMs. He confirmed that “We’ve been working on the technology that allows us to hook to digital wallets, leveraging NFC on mobile phones to replace the card at the transaction at the ATM. Right now the wallet that we support is Android Pay.” Velline continued “But we’re also looking at lots of different mobile wallets and evaluating which ones are going to be appropriate for our customers. We’ll likely add more mobile wallets throughout the year. We recognize our customers are going to have lots of different types of wallets based on their device, based on their bank, based on their OS, and we’re going to continue to find the right balance of which wallets we’re going to support. Right now the initial launch is with Android Pay, but that doesn’t limit us from considering other mobile wallets.” When I pressed harder and asked if that meant Apple Pay would likely be one of those mobile wallets, he admitted with a laugh “I think that’s a good assessment.” When asked about whether its ATMs would work with Apple Pay, Bank Of America’s Consumer Banking Products press representative Betty Riess told me “We already have number of mobile wallet programs…” implying Apple Pay could join them. She confirmed that Bank Of America is “currently developing a new cardless ATM solution. This solution will enable customers to leverage NFC (near field communication) technology on their smart phone in order to authenticate and complete transactions at a Bank of America ATM. We will roll out this capability in late February with associates at select ATMs in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Charlotte, New York and Boston followed by a broader roll out to customers mid year.” The reported news of the cardless ATMs yesterday but didn’t specify that Apple Pay would be involved. Riess requested to double-check what she could say specifically about Apple Pay. When she called me back regarding the ATMs, she was more reserved, saying “At this point we’re not confirming which phones they’ll work with.” But the iPhone is by far the most popular phone in the U.S., so this all meshes with our source saying Bank Of America is working on Apple Pay for ATMs. Apple also did not respond to a request for comment. Bank Of America and Wells Fargo competitor it will be rolling out cardless ATMs this year. While it’s unclear exactly how Apple Pay at ATMs would work, it would likely allow people to withdraw money without needing their debit card or credit card. That could be especially useful if someone lost or forgot their wallet or card. Using NFC and Apple Pay could thwart fraud made possible by card skimmers like this one, from Users would likely tap their phone to the ATM’s NFC point, which would bring up the passcode or thumbprint verification screen on the phone. Once confirmed, users would be able to access some ATM functionality as if they’d inserted their card and entered their pin. Working with Apple Pay could also save the banks money by protecting against fraud. It’s much easier to duplicate a credit card than an iPhone. Apple Pay can be set to require a fingerprint scan, which ATMs don’t offer. Apple Pay passcodes can also be long and complex, compared to the simple 4-digit pin codes used on debit cards. Most importantly, Apple Pay would thwart the use of card skimmers. These devices fit over the front of ATMs as a fake facade, and then steal the information from cards inserted into them. Switching to NFC and mobile phones would prevent this since there would be no card involved. These anti-fraud incentives and consumer interest in the convenience of using NFC to withdraw money could spur banks to race to integrate Apple Pay.
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Amazon Tanks 13% After Reporting Q4 Miss With $1.00 EPS, $35.7B Net Sales
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Lucas Matney
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Despite posting the best quarterly profit in its history, Amazon plummeted as much as 13% after-hours after missing on net sales and earnings per share. This came after the stock had soared to end up nearly 9% in the hours preceding the earnings release. The Seattle-based retail company reported net sales of $35.7 billion for the fourth quarter of 2015, up 22% from $29.3 billion in the previous year, with diluted earnings of $1.00 per share. The street was expecting a gain of $1.56 per share on sales of $35.98 billion. AWS grew 69% YoY to $2.4 billion, beating street expectations of $2.38 billion. Amazon reported a segment operating income of $687 million for AWS up from $240 million in Q4 of last year. Amazon Web Services is more-often-than-not the company’s major profit generator and accounted for a great deal of the stock growth in 2015. Like Apple, Amazon was quick to address the negative effects of the unfavorable foreign exchange rate fluctuations, noting in the report that there was a “$1.2 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter.” North America continues to be the company’s bread-and-butter with net sales of $21.5 billion, up from $17.33 in Q4 of 2014, though international sales are definitely growing as well – up to $11.8 billion from $10.5 billion in Q4 of last year. Amazon’s Q4 is always an important one for the e-commerce company due to the holiday season’s major retail impacts. The company’s retail division still accounts for more than 90% of its business. Most analysts expected Amazon to show strong growth in holiday sales. The company reported after the Thanksgiving weekend that sales of their own devices were three times higher than the previous year, referencing strong growth for the company’s Echo device, Fire tablets and Fire TV devices. Amazon also detailed that paid Prime memberships increased 51%. The service allows consumers perks from the company like free shipping, an expanded catalog and streaming video.
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Microsoft Beats On Strong Cloud Revenue With $25.7B Revenue, $0.78 EPS
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Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft today earnings for its second financial quarter of 2016 (I know, that’s weird, but Microsoft’s financial year ends in June). The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $25.7 billion for the last quarter and $0.78 of adjusted per-share profit. Wall Street Microsoft to deliver an EPS of $0.71 on revenue of $25.26 billion. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $26.5 billion and earnings of $0.71. Microsoft’s stock shot up right after the earnings were announced. “Businesses everywhere are using the Microsoft Cloud as their digital platform to drive their ambitious transformation agendas,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “Businesses are also piloting Windows 10, which will drive deployments beyond 200 million active devices.” , Microsoft broke out results for its different business units for the first time and thankfully, the company didn’t make any changes to this process this time around. Here is what its results look like when we break them down by business unit. Last quarter, Microsoft also announced that its commercial cloud business was on an $8.2 billion annual run rate. This quarter, the company updated this number to $9.4 billion. Microsoft previously said that it expects this number to hit $20 billion in 2018. As Microsoft’s director of investor relations Zack Moxcey told me right after the numbers were announced, he still feels good about this projection. The company today stressed that its performance in the cloud strengthened its results. Revenue from server products grew 10 percent, for example, and Azure revenue grew 140 percent. Microsoft also made some headway in monetizing its search ads. Revenue there was up 29 percent, the company today announced. Moxcey largely attributed this to the integration of search into Windows 10. [graphiq id=”ldLzVnpFGKN” title=”Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)” width=”700″ height=”464″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/ldLzVnpFGKN” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/9638071/Microsoft-Corporation-in-Redmond-WA” link_text=”Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) | FindTheCompany”]
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Nigerian Fintech Company Interswitch Could Become Africa’s First Public Startup Unicorn
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Jake Bright
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Africa’s first billion-dollar tech IPO on a major exchange may be imminent. Nigerian digital payments company will likely go public on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in 2016, sources confirm. The Lagos based fintech firm, majority owned by private equity group , provides much of Nigeria’s digital finance infrastructure. Founded in 2002, Interswitch’s product platforms process the bulk of the country’s growing volume in electronic bank, government, and corporate financial transactions. In personal finance, 32 million consumers use the company’s chip and PIN cards, while its Quickteller digital payment app processed $2.4 billion in transactions. On a pending IPO, Interswitch CEO and founder confirmed, “a dual-listing on the London and Lagos stock exchange is an option on the table. But “It’s not the only one,” he explained, “to facilitate potential exits” by the company’s private equity investors. “We are also looking at a possible ,” Elegbe said on a telephone call from Lagos. Though Interswitch’s CEO would not confirm a 2016 IPO, two sources said the company’s listing is imminent. “They’ve already selected the ibankers and will likely go public sometime between Q2 to Q4 at (or close to) a $1 billion dollar valuation–roughly two times revenues,” said Eghosa Omoigui, Managing Partner of , a Silicon Valley fund investing in African startups. “This is similar to what I’ve heard,” said a another Nigerian startup head who asked not to be named, but whose company is also backed by one of Interswitch’s investors. “Look for them to launch on the LSE in 2016, just north of $1 billion,” the source confirmed. Any billion dollar liquidity event, whether an IPO or trade sale, would mark a milestone for African tech, which to date has produced only and no major public listing. Across the continent, a burgeoning IT sector is emerging parallel to growth and reform in core economies. In countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, is improving, smartphone penetration is rising, and many business sectors are formalizing. Added to this are the demographics of a youth driven consumer market expected to spend over by 2020. This equation creates strong tech opportunities for ventures focused on digital commerce and payments. Some VC investors have taken note, supporting African consumer goods, , and fintech oriented startups to the tune of in 2014, according to Crunchbase supported research. Interswitch investors Helios Partners and also back ventures such as ecommerce platform and Nigerian payments firm . When it comes to digital finance in Africa, discussions usually lead to Kenya’s M-PESA product, run by telco Safaricom. The mobile money platform, recently profiled by “ ,” is now used by 13 million customers, transfers $12 billion in P2P payments annually, and generated 20 percent of Safaricom’s 2014 $1.5 billion revenues. But M-PESA has not found similar success elsewhere in Africa and is facing stiffer competition from banks, telcos, and other fintech firms (including Visa and Mastercard) eager to challenge its Kenyan dominance and scale new apps to Africa’s digital finance market. Many point to Nigeria as the continent’s greatest revenue opportunity for electronic payments given its dual status as Africa’s most populous nation (175 million) and ($510 billion). Consumers in the West African country spend $400 million annually and are projected to generate in ecommerce revenue by 2020. Nigeria’s P2P digital payments traffic compared to Kenya, however, has been slower to scale–largely due to entrenched consumer preferences for cash and a more cumbersome fintech regulatory environment. A 2014 estimated Nigeria’s e-payments revenue potential at $1.2 billion if it attained Kenya’s volumes. Interswitch continues to build digital finance market share in Nigeria and broader Africa. It operates in five African countries and recently launched its Verve payments product on Safaricom’s home turf after acquiring Kenya’s Paynet. Interswitch CEO Elegbe said a possible IPO would also support the company’s plans to expand into additional African countries. As for Interswitch possibly becoming Africa’s first tech unicorn, “It’s obviously good for the market to demonstrate African tech companies can generate that level of revenue,” said EchoVC’s Omoigui. “On the question of exits and IPOS, we’ve gone from ‘if’ to ‘when’ to potentially ‘who next?’. Minting our first fintech unicorn will make a lot of VC investors take African tech much more seriously.”
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Shypmate Pays Travelers To Bring Products To Ghana And Nigeria
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Megan Rose Dickey
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, which is part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, is a quick, low-cost international shipping solution that relies on everyday people to transport items from the U.S. to Ghana and Nigeria. Why Ghana and Nigeria? Well, the founding team (pictured above) has members from both Ghana and Nigeria — two African markets they’re familiar with and have a need for this kind of service, Shypmate co-founder Perry On average, it takes shoppers Nigeria about five weeks to receive packages from the U.S., . It’s also a very costly process. In Shypmate’s test with DHL shipping a $50 pair of shoes to Ghana, it took about a week and cost $250, Ogwuche said. With Shypmate, the cost of shipping is just $25. Shypmate guarantees deliveries within 5-10 days after receiving the item from the retailer, but has been averaging deliveries of just three to five days. Secondly, people in Nigeria and Ghana don’t have access to a lot of the items in the U.S. because some stores, like H&M and Zara, for example, won’t ship to those countries. “Hundreds and hundreds of other stores in the U.S. that people really want to get stuff from just won’t deliver to those countries,” Ogwuche said. “So what people end up doing is trying to do the same thing we’re trying to solve. They try to find someone who’s coming down or find a relative, and they ship it to a relative and the relative holds onto it for months [until they come to Ghana or Nigeria]. It’s already happening in a very inefficient way and at a very low scale.” , all they need to do is send Shypmate a link to whatever it is that they want to purchase. Shypmate then takes care of the entire process, from purchase to delivery. Some initial fears that might come to mind for travelers could be, “but what if I end up carrying something illegal?” Shypmate gets that question a lot, and it’s not going to happen, Ogwuche said Here’s how it works for people in the U.S.: Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Ghana or Nigeria, and you have some extra space in your luggage. You would go to Shypmate and , share your flight information, and provide the best address for you to receive the item. Before you’re approved, Shypmate conducts a background check. Once you arrive in Ghana or Nigeria, the shopper will meet you at the airport. Once the transaction is complete, you’ll receive 70 percent of whatever Shypmate made. On average, Shypmate travelers have made $100 per trip. One Shypmate traveler went to Ghana in November, and ended up making $370. (Side note: my jaw dropped when Ogwuche told me this because when I went to Ghana and Nigeria last August, I spent about $1,000 on flights. That $370 would’ve been pretty sweet to offset the costs of my trip.) In the last two months, Shypmate has facilitated over 150 transactions with a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, and is growing 10 percent every week. So far, people have been using Shypmate for shoes, weaves, iPhones, laptops, jewelry and other products. For the shoppers, Shypmate’s fees are based on the weight, size and price of the product, as well as the willingness of travelers to carry the product. Shypmate’s business is dependent upon how many people are actually traveling to Ghana and Nigeria from the U.S. In a year, over 200,000 people travel from the U.S. to Nigeria or Ghana, Ogwuche said. “The supply part of it is not going to be an issue,” Ogwuche said. “The reality of it is we have a couple of travelers a week and they can meet a lot of demand. In total, we’ve had 35 or so travelers and they’ve met all the 100+ shipments we’ve had. You only really need a small number of travelers to meet a huge ton of demand.” Down the road, post-Y Combinator, Shypmate will likely relocate to New York, where there are more direct flights to Ghana and Nigeria than from the San Francisco Bay Area. Shypmate also wants to expand its offering to other countries. For now, if you’re based in the U.S. and planning a trip to either Ghana or Nigeria, you may want to to help offset the costs of your trip.
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Security And Privacy Standards Are Critical To The Success Of Connected Cars
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Timo van Roermund
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The automotive industry is rapidly evolving to transform the car from a simple mode of transport to a personalized information hub: There will be an estimated connected cars on the road globally by 2020. Each of those cars will be equipped with more than , more than double the number of sensors in connected cars on the road today. New features and capabilities get added every year, improving comfort, convenience, safety and efficiency — but also growing is the amount of data cars generate, process, exchange and store. Connected cars provide benefits such as better traffic flow, improved fuel economy and better infotainment consoles. But at the same time, the number of attack vectors increases, which potentially leaves personal, financial and vehicle information vulnerable, making the connected car attractive to hackers. Already we’ve seen security researchers demonstrate attacks, and have seen hacks on Chryslers, Jeep Cherokees and Volkswagens. These demonstrations and hacks are leaving consumers and lawmakers, as well as cybersecurity and privacy experts, concerned. As the market for connected cars is expected to grow at a five-year , standardized frameworks are necessary to provide customers assurance that a car’s security attributes can be trusted and that the customer’s security needs are protected. Discussions have commenced, such as in July when Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal detailed plans to introduce new legislation called the Security and Privacy in Your Car Act of 2015 (SPY Car Act). The SPY Car Act should ensure that cars sold in the U.S. meet certain standards of protection against digital attacks and restrict what data is collected by vehicles. These standards should be developed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The legislation also recommends auto manufacturers be fined up to $100,000 in civil penalties for each violation of unauthorized access to data in connected cars. Additionally, technology organizations are joining the fight. Intel, for example, created the Automotive Security Review Board to conduct security audits and tests of its automotive hardware platform and offer design recommendations. Lastly, the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance has made efforts to improve interoperability among strong authentication devices, which was originally created to help Google resolve enterprise security issues. But over time, there was value realized for the automotive industry. Efforts by FIDO anonymizes Internet users via physical possessions and protects their digital identities. System performance and reliability has had (and will always have) high attention from vehicle manufacturers, with a strong focus on safety hazards. Cybersecurity threats, however, represent a largely unexplored field for the automotive industry. But like safety, security is a quality aspect — threats of either type can have a negative impact on the reliability and safety of the connected car. By adding wireless interfaces to their cars and connecting their vehicles to external networks, manufacturers are all of a sudden confronted with new threats that stem from an uncontrolled and evolving environment. The fact that one can remotely access in-vehicle systems also implies that these systems face security threats coming from the outside world. And thus, there is a risk that these systems can be hacked and that data contained therein can be stolen. This poses a threat to the reliability and safety of the car — the hacker can potentially take control of the car — as well as to the privacy of the driver — vehicle data can be used to build a profile of car owners. Law enforcement have used bait cars to draw out would-be thieves, then remotely lock and disable the car before arresting them. What if bad guys could take over cars and remotely initiate the brakes on a car traveling at high speeds on the freeway? This not only impacts data, but the safety of drivers and passengers. Beyond just cars for personal use, cars being operated by companies like Uber and other car services are impacted. Today, the ISO 26262 standard addresses systematic failures and random hardware failures. Such safety hazards are quite predictable — systematic failures are deterministic and random hardware failure rates can be predicted with reasonable accuracy — and the nature of the hazards will not change over time. Furthermore, the likelihood that multiple failures occur simultaneously is considered to be rather unlikely in safety engineering. Cybersecurity threats, on the other hand, are generally less predictable, and they also will change over time. Furthermore, hackers do not hesitate to manipulate various parts of a system simultaneously if that increases the chance of a successful attack. As a consequence, security threats are not necessarily covered within a safety framework such as ISO 26262. Cybersecurity frameworks are fairly new to the automotive industry and it will likely take some time, as was the case with functional safety, before they are widely embraced. To successfully protect connected cars from cyberattacks, a paradigm shift is needed in automotive vehicle design: Security must become part of the entire life cycle of the vehicle. It needs to become an integral part of the design process, as opposed to an afterthought, because security is only as strong as the weakest link. It is good practice to apply a defense-in-depth strategy, using multiple security techniques to mitigate the risk of one component of the defense being compromised or circumvented. This calls for security-by-design and privacy-by-design, which may also have a significant impact on the architecture and the in-vehicle electronics. Furthermore, the security architecture requires regular maintenance. In addition, standardization is needed. On the process side, one can think of standardized life-cycle management, from development to deployment to maintenance. Something based on or comparable to Common Criteria could form the basis for such a framework, but automotive-specific adaptations may be needed, as was also the case for ISO 26262 (which was derived from a generic safety standard, IEC 61508). But technical specifications also are a must-have. It’s uncommon for to be made in security architectures and implementations. A seamless integration of features like secure boot and secure communication into a well-reviewed specification like the AUTOSAR software stack is therefore highly beneficial. The standardization bodies are currently taking initial steps to create such standards. For example, the SAE Vehicle Electrical System Security Committee is working on a cybersecurity guidebook (J3061) and requirements for hardware-protected security (J3101), and ISO’s TC22 plans to identify the need for communication channels between functional safety and cybersecurity in ISO 26262 Edition 2. The connected car is a complex IT system on wheels, consisting of many electronic control units (ECU) that are linked together via the in-vehicle network. To secure all of this, an integral approach is needed, where countermeasures are applied at all levels. While standardization efforts have commenced, we’ve only scratched the surface — all the more reason there should be a sense of urgency to get security and privacy standardized and adopted.
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Apple Acquires Education Startup LearnSprout
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Connie Loizos
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Apple has acquired education-technology startup LearnSprout, Bloomberg a bit ago and we have just confirmed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. is a three-year-old, San Francisco-based software startup whose online data insights help K-12 educators track students’ performances. The company had raised $4.7 million from investors across two rounds, including Andreessen Horowitz, Formation 8, and Samsung Ventures. CrunchBase has the full investor list . According to the outlet The Information, the deal and returned investors’ money (just). Apple is working on education tools for the iPad to more aggressively compete with low-cost Chromebook laptops that have been rapidly winning over schools. According to Google, educators were purchasing as far back as the summer of 2014. Apple has similarly touted its to educators, but a December CNBC report noted that Chromebooks now make up of all devices in U.S. classrooms, while Apple’s share of classroom purchases fell by more than half between 2012 and 2015.
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Dropbox Is 2% Black, 5% Hispanic, According To 2015 Diversity Report
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Dropbox , citing some progress around having more women in leadership positions, with 25 percent of the VPs at the company being women, but an overall decline in percentage of women. Last year, Dropbox was 33.9 percent women worldwide. This year, that percentage has dropped to 32 percent worldwide. Regarding blacks and Hispanics, Dropbox has seen an increase in representation but the numbers are still very, very, low. , Dropbox was just 1 percent black and 3.7 percent hispanic. This year, Dropbox is 2 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic. In technical roles in the U.S., Dropbox’s black representation has increased from 0.3 percent to 1 percent black and its hispanic representation has increased from 2 percent to 3 percent. “And although we’ve seen improvement in the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the company, and in technical roles, their representation is starting from a very low base,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Dropbox Global Head of Diversity Judith Michell Williams . “We know we have to do a lot better. Our goal is to continue to increase the number of women and underrepresented minority applicants in our pipeline and make sure we remove any biases in the hiring process.” At the decision-making level, white people make up 73 percent of the senior leadership; Asian people represent 15 percent of the senior leadership team; and blacks and Hispanics make up just 2 percent each of the senior leadership team. Those with two or more races make up 8 percent of the senior leadership team.
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Inside Parlio: Egyptian Activist Wael Ghonim’s New Platform For Social Change
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Sarah Buhr
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Wael Ghonim is an who helped spark the Egyptian Revolution, a wave of protests and demonstrations in Egypt that were part of the Arab Spring, and which helped overthrow the long-reigning Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. , who worked for Google at the time, used social media to unite Egyptians and create the movement in his country and was jailed for it. Thanks to social media and his connections at Google, Ghonim was freed in mere days. The same was not true for many of his friends. Last week marked the five-year anniversary of the Arab Spring, but some have called the aftermath in Egypt a “bitter winter.” The revolution failed to bring change and there are reports citizens there are now worse off – the country has a new dictator, now lacks a free press and is flooded with propaganda, and activists are often intimidated and detained. Ghonim now resides in the United States, along with his family, and has launched a new discussion platform called , which he hopes will continue helping to spark civil conversations. The platform, available both on the web and iOS, is designed to encourage intelligent conversations around the issues of our day and utilizes social media and online articles to do so. Parlio is still in the early stages and you must be invited to add to the conversation. You’ll also need to pledge that you will engage civilly before contributing to the discussion. The hope is that squashes trolling and flame wars often found on other social media threads. I sat down with Ghonim and his team to discuss his new startup and how we can use online tools to create the change we want to see in our world.
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BirdEye Swoops In On $8 Million Series A
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Connie Loizos
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, a software company focused on helping its clients improve their business reputations and customer experiences in real time, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Trinity Ventures. As part of the investment, Trinity’s Ajay Chopra has joined the board. Plenty of Silicon Valley luminaries also piled into the round, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang; Square’s project engineering lead Gokul Rajaram; Kevin Weil (the former Twitter product head who just to Instagram); BranchOut founder Rick Marini; Haystack founder Semil Shah; and angel investor Ellen Levy. To learn more about the company, which has been bootstrapped until now, we chatted earlier this week with CEO Naveen Gupta, who was formerly chief product officer at the telephony software company Ring Central, and whose BirdEye cofounder is his brother, Neeraj, a longtime technical lead at Yahoo. Gupta says that what the company does in a nutshell is “intelligent reputation marketing.” To underscore how it works, he makes up an example, noting that these days, “If your pizza is burned, you go to Twitter and write ‘[So and so’s] pizza was burned.’ You go to Yelp and Urbanspoon and post negative reviews about your experience, or you tell your friends on Facebook.” BirdEye collects signals from all that unstructured data and provides the pizza company with a measurement of its business health based on those findings. Once the client company fixes its act, step two is to amplify the good things people are saying about that company. Was the pizza delicious? Was your car ready for you when you showed up to rent it? Consumers can let the company know by responding to a quick SMS message they’re likely to receive shortly after the pizza was delivered, or while they’re still standing in the rental car parking lot. (Among BirdEye’s related feedback mechanisms are tweets, surveys, and other fields that make reviews simple to create.) It isn’t a new idea; BirdEye has (though Gupta insists that because it isn’t a pure-play reputation company, that it doesn’t compete with 90 percent of the startups in its space). Still, BirdEye is apparently getting some high marks. Gupta says it already works with more than 10,000 customers and that, before taking on funding, BirdEye, which has 40 employees, had turned profitable. (It charges customers anywhere from $2,400 per year to several hundred thousand dollars annually, depending on their size.) The plan now is to build the next generation of the platform and expand it for bigger enterprises. Though it built its business by catering largely to small and medium-size businesses, Gupta says that “increasingly, we’re being pulled up market. Now we want to fulfill the use case for Fortune 100 companies, too.”
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JD.com’s Financial Services Arm Lands $1B Led By Sequoia China At $7.1B Valuation
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Jon Russell
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Alibaba isn’t the only e-commerce service in China with a financial services arm capable of raising large amounts of external funding. While Alibaba’s Ant Financial raised an undisclosed round last summer at a colossal $45-$50 billion valuation, its rival e-commerce giant JD.com’s money-focused unit is also in the money after (around $1.01 billion) from a clutch of high-profile investors. Sequoia Capital China, China Harvest Investments and China Taiping Insurance led the round, which included other undisclosed financiers and values JD Finance at RMB 46.65 billion (approximately $7.1 billion) post-money. That’s not as high as Ant Financial, which includes hugely popular payment service Alipay among its business interests, but it’s impressive nonetheless. JD.com itself is listed on the NASDAQ. Its operational reach covers seven and 196 warehouses across 46 cities. JD Finance provides a range of financial services and products to consumers, startups, SMEs and other businesses in China. Last year, to create a joint-venture that offers credit services in China, and this new funding will be used to further expand its scope of financial offerings for customers. “JD Finance has become a leading industry player by leveraging JD.com’s e-commerce expertise and advantages in big data and technology to provide financial solutions to Chinese consumers, innovative start-ups and traditional enterprises,” Richard Liu, CEO of JD.com, said in a statement. “By partnering with top financial and start-up service institutions, we will be even better positioned to create China’s leading financial technology ecosystem.” China’s big three Internet companies — , and (BAT) — all offer financial and banking services in the country, so there’s plenty of competition as China’s online financial revolution continues to gain momentum.
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Axway Acquires Mobile App Development Platform Appcelerator
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Frederic Lardinois
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Appcelerator has been acquired. The mobile app development platform that counts T-Mobile, PayPal and GameStop among its customers has been bought by the B2B enterprise company Axway in an all-cash deal. Chances are, isn’t a company you’re necessarily familiar with, but it’s a large with headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona that offers software and services to help enterprises handle their data flows. It’s a subsidiary of the much larger France-based group. Axway currently has about 11,000 customers and about 2,000 employees. It’s Q3 2015 revenue was €65.9 million. Appcelerator, which is probably still best known for its Titanium framework for writing mobile apps, has a few hundred customers. The company raised about $87.9 million before this acquisition. Some of its investors include Accel, Mayfield Fund, Red Hat, EDB Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, Union Grove Venture Partners and Translink Captial. While neither Appcelerator now Axway were willing to disclose the price of the acquisition, Appcelerator CEO and co-founder Jeff Haynie told me that the deal has closed and the money is in the bank. He noted that the deal worked out well for both the investors and Appcelerator employees. As Haynie told me, his company has had a lot of suitors over the years. “We got excited when Axway approached us,” he told me — largely because of Axway’s profile as a market leader in its field and the fact that there is virtually no overlap between its product portfolio and Appcelerator’s. “One of the nice things about this marriage is that there is zero overlap,” he said. “They have nothing in mobility and APIs in the way we do.” He also noted that tools like Axway existing API gateways and management tools were also on Appcelerator’s roadmap. “From a product roadmap, there is an immediate strategic advantage there,” Haynie said. Axway CEO Jean-Marc Lazzari echoed this in a separate interview. He also stressed that the two companies already share a number of customers, but because they used to sell differently — with Appcelerator focusing on selling directly to developers and Axway selling in a more traditional hands-on enterprise way — they were often talking to different groups within those companies. What this acquisition is really about, then, is giving enterprises an end-to-end solution from ingesting their data to making it available on mobile. The mobile piece was clearly missing from Axway’s portfolio so far. Using Axway’s services, they were able to make their data available through APIs, but that’s as far as the company was able to take its clients so far. For Axway, this acquisition is also about moving its customers to — that is, giving them both the stability and safety that its products have traditionally provided, and the ability to become more agile and move fast enough to remain competitive. Axway and Appcelerator are clearly very different companies, something Lazarri and Haynie both acknowledged. But Lazarri also stressed that Axway is still relatively small and agile, with about 2,000 employees, and that he has run startups himself. “We don’t want to hug [Appcelerator] to death,” Lazarri told me. “We had long discussions and I’ve done that rodeo before — where you move from a startup to a larger entity.” Lazarri also noted that this acquisition will give Axway a presence in Silicon Valley. “We will probably use Appcelerator as a kind of innovation center or digital lab,” he said, but both he and Haynie noted that Appcelerator’s products aren’t going away. “The brands — Titanium and Appcelerator — are strong brands and we will keep those,” he said. “We have no intention not to try to leverage the maximum of the brands we are buying.”
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Autonomous Robots Are Changing The Way We Build And Move Products Around The World
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Jim Rock
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Many eyes may be gazing toward the sky in anxious anticipation of , but an increasing number of intelligent robot systems is already on the ground, in warehouses and manufacturing facilities, helping to manufacture and move products across the globe. These automated systems, which employ the world’s most innovative advancements in software, artificial intelligence and machine learning, are transforming the core process of how each and every product is produced and delivered. Beyond amazing developments within robotics, we need to recognize the equally significant advancements in machine vision that are driving the vast applications transforming industries today. Vision guided vehicles (VGVs) are becoming more necessary to transport heavy loads autonomously and ensure two-day, next-day and same-day deliveries. We’re seeing deployment of VGVs throughout manufacturing and advanced fulfillment facilities across multiple industries, including automotive, industrial product development and retail. In this post, we’ll explore three companies set to make waves in the near future for the autonomous robot industry. As a pioneer of 3D vision technology for warehouses and fulfillment centers, we’re excited to see how these new innovations will improve and streamline supply chains. , the new venture by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, is introducing autonomous robots to a street corner near you. Designed to address the “last mile” — the notoriously difficult final leg of the delivery process — the Starship bots will deliver groceries and small packages to suburban homes. Operating autonomously 99 percent of the time, each robot uses high-resolution navigation software to pinpoint its location, and a camera and radar to avoid obstacles. The mini-fridge-sized vehicles will have speakers and microphones to chat with humans, and their six-wheel treads can even climb small staircases. The firm will launch a beta program in Greenwich, London and in the U.S., so keep an eye out for these robots scooting around our sidewalks soon. Don’t be surprised if sometime in the near future, as you urge your shopping cart around the busy aisle at your local grocery store, you come face to face with a tall, cylindrical robot, quietly scanning the shelves as it zips noiselessly past you. That’s the future envisioned by , a Silicon Valley startup whose robot, cutely named Tally, monitors grocery story inventory, ensuring that items are properly stocked, in the correct section and priced accurately. A single Tally robot, moving four feet at a time and pausing to take a hi-res photograph, can scan more than 15,000 items per hour. Although Tally can’t rectify the errors it spots, it does send the data it captures to the cloud for processing, then presents recommendations to retailers through a mobile app. The real winning element here is that, like our VGVs, Tally does not need special store infrastructure to do its job, and can function safely amongst customers and staff during business hours. And like iRobot’s Roomba, it will return to its charging dock when running low on power. With the human population steadily increasing, our ability to efficiently grow, harvest and distribute food is now a global issue. The world’s agricultural industry will need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, which is why David Dorhour, an Iowa inventor, a swarm of robots that could revolutionize the agricultural industry. Prospero, the name for the initial prototype, is a small, six-legged bot that, when joined with hundreds of other identical bots, will form a swarm of farming robots that can quickly and accurately plant acres of land. Prospero requires no GPS or complex vision software — it sees only what is directly beneath it. If it detects a patch of soil with no seed, it plants one at a precise depth, sprays it with a preprogrammed amount of fertilizer and nutrients, covers the seed and marks the spot with a shot of fluid, which lets other robots know that this small area is already planted. When the swarm is at full force, all the robots will be planting simultaneously. Each Prospero bot will have radio communication, so if one comes across a large section of dirt with no seeds, it can signal others to come help; similarly, if it finds a patch that is planted too densely, it will let its fellow bots know to work elsewhere. By programming the robots to use simple communication instead of constantly monitoring each other’s locations, Dorhour cuts down on the computing power needed and makes the system more feasible for users in rural areas. And the swarming technology provides farmers with the ultimate control: While agriculture today happens at the field-by-field level, with these robots, farmers could make plant-by-plant decisions. We no longer need to look to the skies for the next wave of robotics to transform our world: They’re already at our feet. For some, the notion that intelligent machines will play a formidable role in the economy of the future is worrisome. Martin Ford, in his book While it’s true that tomorrow’s industries will likely look quite different than they do today, I anticipate a workplace where humans and robots work in collaboration. Researchers from Boston University seem to . Robots are incredibly proficient at performing repetitive and routine tasks, but there is simply no replacement for human creativity, empathy and intellect. As we begin 2016, we should embrace the automation technology that helps us move goods around the planet — and look forward to a future where robots make all our jobs less mundane.
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A First Look At Mobile Gamers In Iran
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Amir Bozorgzadeh
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Here’s a fresh profile of the Iranian mobile games scene that’ll provide some useful insights to developers and publishers interested in this otherwise foggy market. We gathered the data via a survey we ran between January 2-10 2016, sampling 837 mobile gamers on our channel on LINE, the popular messaging app in Iran. What’s peculiar to note before I get started in sharing the data is that half of the respondents had to use a VPN to access the survey because the platform, Survey Gizmo, is currently blocked by some of the ISPs. Jumping into this relatively untapped market isn’t too impressive at first glance. I’ve estimated mobile games revenue in 2015 to be somewhere around US$39 million based on Newzoo’s latest country report. That’s assuming the mobile share of total games revenue ($194 million) is about 20 percent, which is markedly lower than the global mobile average of 30-35 percent. But this estimate is being optimistic! Based on the same calculations, we should expect mobile games revenue to grow to $44 million in 2016. To put this into perspective, add an extra $100 million to these modest figures and you have the annual mobile games revenue of Turkey, a neighboring country with the same population size. Iran is lagging by a factor of 3-4 times. The majority (60 percent) of Iran’s 80 million population is under 30 years of age, so it’s not surprising that 67 percent of mobile gamers are under 24. Iran also has one of the highest education-to-population ratios in the world, so don’t be surprised when you hear that 63 percent of them are students. Tack on the fact that 80 percent are single and never married and you’ll be able to better stomach the reality that about half (47 percent) report a household income of less than US$571 per month. This last one stings the most for all of us riding the F2P train, where disposable income is so crucial. I’ve written about the mobile games market in Saudi Arabia, and Iran is nowhere near as juicy. It’s closer to what you can expect from Egypt, another country with a similar profile relative to population size and spending power (at least when it comes to the state of their digital markets). But part of the reason lies with developers who haven’t localized their titles to Iran’s mother tongue, Farsi (78 percent say they primarily play games in English!), due to obvious socioeconomic reasons, nor the payment method and in-game packs to local channels and conditions. On the payment end, developers have been barred from localizing their payment gateways to Iran due to international sanctions, particularly the “shetab” and “shaparak” networks that allow players to pay for in-app purchases using their debit cards. It’s rare to come across a game that has adjusted their freemium pricing packs to the local GDP. This leaves Iranian gamers in the uncomfortable position of having to pay at a scale that is simply out of the league of these young, single, low-income students. About one in five (19 percent) pay for in-app purchases each month, which is mostly through scratch and gift cards that are widely spread throughout the country. The remaining transactions happen on third-party app stores that are integrated to local payment methods. Sixty percent of the minnows pay less than $5 per month, and 19 percent spend between $5-20. The whales are strangely distributed, with 1 percent paying between $85-142 per month, 1 percent paying more than $285 per month and barely anyone in sight between the two ranges. The paid games market, however, seems to be in healthier shape, with 35 percent of players reporting they pay to play, and 30 percent reporting they do so at least once a month. In terms of general usage, 67 percent play mobile games several times a day and 19 percent play for at least three hours (34 percent play for 1-3 hours). Eighty-four percent are on Android devices and 13 percent are on iOS. The key factors that influence their choice of game are word of mouth or recommendation by a friend (52 percent), app ranking (47 percent) and news or magazine articles (28 percent). The genres they play the most are action (52 percent) and strategy (49 percent), followed by the usual contenders of sports (30 percent), racing (23 percent), puzzle (17 percent) and arcade (15 percent).
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SpaceX Successfully Launches Satellite, Unsuccessfully Lands Rocket
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Emily Calandrelli
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Today, SpaceX was hoping to achieve the first-ever rocket recovery on a drone ship in the ocean. While the company successfully completed its primary mission of bringing the Jason-3 satellite into orbit, it was unable to safely recover the first stage of the rocket. About 10 minutes after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Falcon 9 first stage was scheduled to land on a drone ship floating in the ocean. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, tweeted that while the touchdown speed of the rocket was okay, there was an issue with one of the landing legs which caused the rocket to tip over after landing. First stage on target at droneship but looks like hard landing; broke landing leg. Primary mission remains nominal → — SpaceX (@SpaceX) After further data review, stage landed softly but leg 3 didn’t lockout. Was within 1.3 meters of droneship center — SpaceX (@SpaceX) It’s important to note that the primary purpose of the launch, to bring the $180 million Jason-3 satellite into orbit, was completely nominal. By all accounts, today’s mission was considered a success and Jason-3 is now in orbit around the Earth. SpaceX repeatedly emphasized that its rocket recovery attempt was an experiment and the secondary objective. Even so, this was disappointing news for many who were watching, especially after SpaceX successfully recovered a rocket on land just last month. Musk tweeted that this landing attempt was inherently more difficult than the previous successful attempt on land at Cape Canaveral. Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating & rotating. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Screenshot from SpaceX drone ship live stream Viewers were watching live footage of the drone ship minutes before the scheduled landing when the video cut out. At 200 miles away from land, the live stream was reliant on satellite internet connection. Choppy waters made it difficult to keep that connection throughout the duration of the mission and live video feed of the unsuccessful landing was unavailable. SpaceX stated that it will provide footage of the landing at a later time. The recovery location for this launch was changed from a stable pad on land to a drone ship because SpaceX was unable to receive “environmental approval” to bring its rocket back to land. Today’s landing attempt won’t be SpaceX’s last. During a press conference on Friday, SpaceX vice president of mission assurance Hans Koenigsmann said that the company would like to attempt a land recovery at Vandenberg Air Force Base in the future. He mentioned that there will be 3 or 4 more launches out of Vandenberg this year, allowing for more opportunities for west coast rocket landings in the future.
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